Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib

Terror and the Arts

Previous Edited Volumes by Matti Hyvärinen Hyvärinen, Matti, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykkänen, eds. 2006. The travelling concept of narrative. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (COLLeGIUM) http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume _1/index.htm. Carver, Terrell, and Matti Hyvärinen, eds. 1997. Interpreting the political: New methodologies. London and New York: Routledge.

Terror and the Arts Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib Edited by Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

TERROR AND THE ARTS

Copyright © Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60671-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-60671-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hyvärinen, Matti and Muszynski, Lisa Terror and the arts : artistic, literary, and political interpretations of violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib / edited and with an introduction by Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60671-7 (alk. paper) 1. Terror in art. 2. Arts, Modern. I. Hyvärinen, Matti. II. Muszynski, Lisa. NX650.T48T47 2008 700'.4552—dc22

2007047880

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Introduction: The Arts Investigating Terror Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

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Part 1: Visualizing Terror 1 The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero Frank Möller

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2 Art in the Age of Terror: The Israeli Case Dana Arieli-Horowitz

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3 The Aura of Terror? Kia Lindroos

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Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror 4 Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West Margaret Heller

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5 To This Side of Good and Evil: Primo Levi as a Truth-teller Tuija Parvikko

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6 Narrating the Trauma: Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance Kuisma Korhonen

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7 Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and the Circulation of Trauma Matti Hyvärinen

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Contents

Part 3: Governmental Terror 8 Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (1974–89) Caterina Preda 9 Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control: Chinese Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) Minna Valjakka 10 The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber: Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria Javier Franzé

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Part 4: The Terror of Theory 11 The Violence of Lying Olivia Guaraldo

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12 Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art Lauri Siisiäinen

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Index

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Figures and Tables

Figure 2.1 Miki Kratsman, “Om el Phaem,” 2002.

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Figure 2.2 David Reeb, Where are the Soldiers? 2003.

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Figure 2.3 Gal Weinstein, Uday, 2004.

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Figure 2.4 Gal Weinstein, Qusay, 2004.

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Figure 2.5 David Wackstein, Swastika, 2001.

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Figure 2.6 Dganit Berest, The Wall, 2004 (detail).

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Figure 2.7 David Tartakover, I’m Here, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1994, 2003–2004. (Based on a photograph by Ziv Koren.)

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Figure 3.1 Guy Raz, “Two Seconds,” 2004–2006.

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Table 8.1

Comparative view of the two regimes

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Table 8.2

Comparative view of artistic manifestations

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea for this book grew out of a small symposium, “Arts and Terror,” held at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in May 2006. The arrangement of the symposium became possible thanks to the Academy of Finland, and its new Centre for Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. The centre has three research teams; one of them is Politics and the Arts, the organizer of the symposium. We thank all of the participants of the symposium for the enduring discussions and enthusiasm that helped to launch the work for this volume. Moreover, the existence of the international Politics and the Arts group, now a standing group of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), helped greatly in getting in touch with the people interested in the hybrid area of terror and the arts. As in every work of this nature, the editing process is one that owes many thanks to those individuals who enable it. We are particularly grateful to the research team coordinator Anitta Kananen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), not only for practical arrangements of the event, but also for all kinds of help during the editorial process. Moreover, Professor Michael Shapiro (University of Hawaii, United States) was of great help at a decisive moment in the publication process. Another key person is Peggy Heller (University of King’s College, Halifax, Canada), who jumped in to help as a coeditor, commentator, and consultant whenever and wherever this was needed; Kati Thors at the Copyshop in Espoo has freely given of her time and expertise in all things technical; Annikki Harris (University of Helsinki Language Services) has cooperated at the office, providing Lisa Muszynski with the requisite freedom to work on this project almost continuously, while our families have borne the brunt of the systematic neglect that such focus entails. Special thanks to those nearest and dearest who have the patience to endure us to the end: Tuula H. and Peter, Johann, and Annie M. Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski Tampere and Helsinki

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Contributors

Dana Arieli-Horowitz, PhD, is head of the History and Theory Unit at Bezalel, Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She has published extensively on arts under totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Among her publications are: Romanticism of Steel: Art and Politics in Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Magness, Hebrew University Press, 1999); Creators in Overburden: Rabin’s Assassination, Art and Politics (Jerusalem: Magness/ Hebrew University Press, 2005, and winner of the Israeli Prime Minister Award); and The Totalitarian Ideal: Art and Politics Between the Wars (forthcoming, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press). She is currently working on the relationship between art and politics in Israel, and in particular on art and terror. Javier Franzé, PhD (political science), a lecturer at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His field of research is the conceptual history of politics in Western thought, on which he has published ¿Qué es la política? Tres respuestas: Aristótles, Weber, Schmitt (Madrid, Catarata, 2004), as well as various other articles. He also researches the relation between violence, power, and politics, especially focused on its implications for the relationship between ethics and politics. Olivia Guaraldo, PhD, is lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Verona. Her main fields of research are political and feminist theory, where she has worked extensively on the thought of Hannah Arendt and its relationship with literature and history (Storylines, 2001; Politica e racconto, 2003). She has edited and introduced the Italian translation of Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers (It. 2006), as well as Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender (It. 2006) and Precarious Life (It. 2004). She is currently working on the relationship between violence and power in modern political thought. She is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change.

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Margaret (Peggy) Heller, PhD, is assistant professor in humanities and social science at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. She regularly teaches in two interdisciplinary programs, Foundation Year and Contemporary Studies, the first focusing on core texts of the Western intellectual tradition and the second on contemporary theory. She has recently completed a doctorate specializing in intellectual and cultural history at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati Ohio. The title of her dissertation is “The Dawning of the West: On the Genesis of a Concept.” She is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. Matti Hyvärinen, PhD (political science), is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland. His current research project is on the conceptual history of narrative, and he leads the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. Currently he is also a virtual fellow at the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies, University of Edinburgh. He has published earlier, for example, on Paul Auster (Partial Answers) and on old Finnish novels (Qualitative Inquiry). Kuisma Korhonen, PhD, is currently docent and research fellow at the Institute of Art Research, University of Helsinki. He is also the leader of the research project Encounters in Art and Philosophy, funded by the Finnish Academy. His latest publications include Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006), ed. Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), and an article “Textual Communities” (Culture Machine 8, 2006). He will also be the guest editor for the e-journal History and Theory: Protocols (February 2008), and a coeditor for Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (New York: Lexington Books, 2008). Kia Lindroos, PhD (political science), is senior assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is chair/convener of Politics and the Arts Standing Group for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), as well as chair of the Finnish Political Science Association. Frank Möller, PhD, is research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Finland, and the coeditor of Cooperation and Conflict. He is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change.

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Lisa Muszynski holds a Master’s degree (history) from the University of Helsinki and is currently working on her PhD thesis in the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her field of interest is philosophy and theory of history, wherein she examines historians’ attitudes/orientations and the ways in which these, in turn, help to shed light on the dynamics of continuity and change over time. She is an associate member of Politics and the Arts research team. Tuija Parvikko, PhD (political science), is Academy of Finland research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and at the Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. She is the author of The Responsibility of the Pariah: The Impact of Bernard Lazare on Arendt’s Conception of Political Action and Judgement in Extreme Situations. Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1996. Currently she is finishing a manuscript on Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past. Her current research project is on the politics of the past in the Finnish postwar context. Caterina Preda is a PhD candidate in political science at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, with a thesis on “Dictators and Dictatorships: Artistic Expressions of the Political in Chile and Romania (1974–1989)” to be submitted in October 2008. She holds a Master’s degree in comparative politics and political theory in the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, as well as a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies en Science Politique of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is teaching undergraduate classes on Contemporary Latin America and Art and Politics at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest. Lauri Siisiäinen is a researcher and postgraduate student of political science in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is also a member of the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change and he is currently preparing his PhD thesis on the political theory of audition and sonority. Minna Valjakka, MA, Chinese art history researcher, is currently a postgraduate student of Art History in the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She is preparing her PhD thesis on contemporary Chinese art. She won a scholarship to study in Fudan University, Shanghai, in 2001–2002, and in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2006–2007.

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INTRODUCTION

The Arts Investigating Terror Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski

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he idea of this volume is not merely to investigate the arts in order to uncover new kinds of representations of terror, trauma, and violence. The argument and purpose of this book is a step more ambitious. Art Spiegelman has cleverly outlined this dilemma in his In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by saying, “Leave me alone, Damn it! I’m just trying to comfortably relive my September 11 trauma but you keep interrupting . . . Like that mind-numbing 2002 ‘anniversary’ event, when you tried to wrap a flag around my head and suffocate me!” Spiegelman works vigorously against the political appropriation of the trauma of 9/11 by the Bush government, claiming for himself a proper space for working through and unpacking the trauma without hasty, projective, and dubious political mobilizations. While he is trying to relive his trauma comfortably, as he says, he seems to reflect ironically his need for distance from the political class.1 He is a participant in the political process by virtue of working with terror and trauma, and not just by depicting it. This is one of the paradoxes of the political literature on terror, wherein the first moves seem often to consist in determined resistance to politicization, and in a demand for an entirely personal experience of loss before wider conclusions are drawn. Spiegelman’s ironic work also explains and justifies the scope of this book from one important perspective. The topic of this book is not terrorism per se, enacted by a definite group of nongovernmental actors called “terrorists.” The author’s autobiographical character Mouse, asleep and obviously dreaming about the innocent world of the erotic cartoon in his hand, is approached by two ghastly figures, and according to the text, being “equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and his own Government.” This thread of “equal” terror by governments is a recurrent theme in recent films (Alejandro Gonzáles In~árritu’s

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Babel being a good example of governmental violence launched by an assumed “terrorist” attack) and novels (for example, Auster 1987; Ondaatje 2001; Rushdie 2005). As the chapters in this volume by Tuija Parvikko, Kuisma Korhonen, Caterina Preda, and Minna Valjakka indicate, the most horrific examples of twentieth century terror have been imposed by totalitarian governments. Ondaatje’s (2001) novel on Sri Lanka and Rushdie’s (2005) work on Kashmir indicate an even murkier reality where terrorist attacks and governmental violence cohabit, feed each other, and sometimes lose the thin border between one another altogether. The Repetition of Trauma Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) offers a particularly helpful study on the relationships between the arts, terror, terrorism, and trauma. From the very first sentence of the novel, we are set into a peacefully breathing, deliberate rhythm. He writes, beginning the novel immediately after the attack on Manhattan, “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads” (3). The voice is matter-of-fact, pensive, somber, and very careful not to precipitate extraneous emotional arousals. It signals a serious attempt to visit the past experience by carefully shifting through all the layers of political and media rubble that has accumulated over the last few years. It is one answer to the critical, post-9/11 question of the psychologist and philosopher Jens Brockmeier, who writes, “Is there a vocabulary, a style, a genre to articulate the tension between what the smell of bodies means to you as a human being and how you feel about the political claims and actions that try to justify themselves by referring to the same bodies? . . . Is there a language to talk about such experiences at all?” (Brockmeier 2008). DeLillo foregrounds his characters’ private experiences and their coping strategies. The title of his novel already signals the possibility for multiple interpretations. The main character, Keith, who escaped from one of the Twin Towers during the September 11 attacks, is somehow losing his grip on his previous life, obviously tripping him up to make him fall. People falling from the towers, some hand in hand, is of course one of the most poignant images of 9/11. But then there is also the performance artist Falling Man, doing his act in public places right after the terrorist attacks. Keith’s wife Lianne is one who witnesses the perplexing act, insofar as, “a man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from

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his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct. . . . There was awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all” (33). The falling act may well be redescribed in terms suggested by Dominick LaCapra (2001, 2004) as acting out, repeating the moment of terror. The act, in its “awful openness,” seems to be the exact opposite of DeLillo’s carefully mediated discourse; a highly disturbing and disturbed artistic way of approaching terror and trauma. The jumps were as painful to the artist, David Janiak, himself, and he died at age thirty-nine, “apparently of natural causes” (220). Because of his acts, he had “been arrested at various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct” (220). We have here an artist taking high risks, transgressing many boundaries, but at the same time reproducing the original scene of trauma with minimal distance from it. Moreover, this is highly suggestive of the repetitive artworks of certain Israeli artists exposed to suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, recounted in this volume in Chapter 2 by Dana Arieli-Horowitz. David Janiak, as indeed some of the real-life Israeli artists as well, may be accused of not properly taking the reactions of the traumatized audience into account. But is this power of provocation not something that the arts are working with constantly? There is a trace of Dadaism in the act, in the sense that Kia Lindroos writes about in Chapter 3, Janiak ostensibly having a clear “intention,” as Lindroos observes regarding Dada, “to create a scandal and inspire public indignation.” Yet the figure of the Falling Man is only one element among many other aspects of repetition in DeLillo’s novel. A group of children withdraw repeatedly from the adults to a room with binoculars, in order to watch if and when the next plane will hit the towers, insisting that the towers were not yet entirely collapsed. Keith, the man who survived, delves more and more into the repetitive and controlled world of professional poker after having lost a friend he used to play poker with, and so on. Yet paradoxically, Keith, who was estranged from his wife Lianne and almost entirely incapable of expressing his inner concerns before the events of 9/11, now had occasional moments of closeness with Lianne between his poker playing sprees. Perhaps the most compelling singular element of the novel is its ending. With regard to temporality, the novel resists conventional narrative progression—the insistence on various forms of repetition being one form of this resistance—and instead creates a loop by ending just a moment before everything began. At the end, Keith is back in Manhattan, at his office, right after the attack and working his way down through the corridor, seeing his dead

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friend. This ending may be read in at least two different, yet interconnected ways. Whatever life and vitality had returned to Keith’s life with Lianne and his son, the traumatic moment of the collapsing towers and the smell of death is there, and will always be there, whatever the cure. The experience is not only in the past, but it persists in the present, and continues on into the future. The temporary loop, in this sense, protects the novel from an overly straightforward closure and moral elevation. Nonetheless, the ending may also be seen, in all of its remaining horror, in a slightly more optimistic light. After all, Keith is now revisiting the traumatic scenery; he is at least capable of remembering, observing the details, seeing the man falling. The loop remains, there is no fixed meaning or resolution of the consequences of the event, yet the beginning is no longer an invisible, untouchable darkness. Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) does something analogous by foregrounding the traumatic reactions and disturbed world of a nine-year-old boy who had lost his father in the terrorist attack on Manhattan. The experimental narration of the boy’s partly psychotic world is connected thematically to Kuisma Korhonen’s discussion on Georges Perec’s work in Chapter 6. The boy’s world is even more sanitized of public, political maneuverings, and hectic nationalism that followed the events than even Keith’s world in DeLillo’s novel, thereby creating space for the artistic processing of the experience. Both of these novels systematically reject the nationalistic frame of the events of 9/11, thus “interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation,” as Olivia Guaraldo observes in Chapter 11. In so doing, they, of course, simultaneously bracket all such sweepingly broad, totalizing theories and explanations of the attack that Peggy Heller discusses critically in Chapter 4. Rushdie’s World of Terror Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) chooses an entirely different strategy than either DeLillo or Foer, and approaches the political and national aspects of terror, terrorism, and violence directly. But in order to do this in a properly non-nationalist way, he locates his characters within a complex and changing, multinational setting, letting go of the nation-state as a naturalized frame for the novel. One of his key characters, Maximilian Ophuls (a name borrowed from the German Jewish film director, who emigrated to the United States via France), begins his political career in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war, he moves to the United States to become U.S. ambassador to India, but is forced to retire due to a womanizing scandal. Later he leads U.S. classified operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and, because of this assignment, he is effective in the creation

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and funding of the Taliban as a counterforce to the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Finally, he is murdered in a personal-cum-terrorist attack in Los Angeles. As a victim, he, if anyone, is neither an innocent bystander nor guilty in such a grave way that his murder could appear as ethically justified. The story has another beginning in Kashmir, in the paradisiacal time preceding the division between Indian and Pakistani nation-states, in the following era of brutish Indian military presence, and the increasingly fundamentalist guerrilla movements—terrorists—against Indian presence and the entire Hindu population. Shalimar the Clown is not one of the easiest novels to read and digest—far from it, in fact. The complex architecture of the novel endeavors nothing less than to capture the geopolitical complexity of the worlds of terror and terrorism in one book, and the novel might well be characterized as a literary encyclopedia of contemporary terror, even including the discussion on the dehumanizing effects of death rows in the United States. It takes time to realize, for example, that Rushdie employs an entirely different language for events in Europe and North America versus the magical realism and complicated language of Kashmiri events. He outlines the prenationalistic era of Kashmir, a time when Pandits and Muslims are able to live freely together, eat and cook similar fantastic banquets, and wear traditional garments without orthodox veiling. The marriage between Shalimar the Clown, a Muslim boy, and Boonyi, a Hindu girl, epitomizes the now long-gone spirit of peaceful coexistence in the remote village of Pachigam. When Boonyi escapes with Max Ophuls, for a short-term affair with the wish for a more spectacular life than the village could offer, the embittered and unforgiving Shalimar begins his career as a terrorist—soon to meet more orthodox fighters who originally wanted to kill him, simply because of his history as an entertainer. He becomes “a student, a scholar of rage” (272); and in due course he “became a person of value and consequence, as assassins are” (275). Here, personal loss and hatred receives a political articulation in a way that DeLillo, Foer, and Spiegelman resist in the case of 9/11. A number of Rushdie’s stylistic choices may, at first, be astounding. Once the narrator reports, almost in the style of journalistic critique or testimonial, how the fundamentalist groups come from Pakistan, force the Muslim women to wear burkhas against their will and tradition, and frighten the Hindu families into escaping the country by randomly slaughtering a part of their population. At the same time, however, the province is full of Indian troops, using similar terror tactics against suspicious civilians. All of a sudden the author shifts from narration to political essay, and directly challenges the Indian authorities. He writes, “There were six hundred thousand Indian

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troops in Kashmir but the pogroms of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that . . . The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that” (296; 1 lakh= 100,000 in the Indian numbering system). For the reader, this step from the grimly outlined story-world to authorial indictment appears emotionally and surprisingly well grounded, while the entire gravity of war crimes and terror had become so weighty that the open charge feels almost like a relief: someone is out there to protest the cruelties, including the reader as a secondary witness. A bit later—after an accounting of the brutalities enacted by both parties, that is, the fundamentalists and the Indian army—the narrator stops for a moment to reflect upon the situation by observing, “There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun” (309). This is one of the enduring concerns about how far the arts can, or any account for that matter, go in terms of describing—or performing, in Janik’s case—horror without becoming part of that same horror, a theme which is addressed further in this volume, especially in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Moreover, it can become an issue pivoting upon that of the dignity of the victim, as Frank Möller writes in Chapter 1, “If victims are humiliated and abused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images, then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of the perpetrators.” Rushdie’s well-trained, internationally experienced, callous and well-connected terrorists seem to render some of their predecessors of no more than two decades ago very amateurish indeed, as in Doris Lessing’s (1985) The Good Terrorist and Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992). Lessing’s homespun, leftist terrorists remain nearly comically shabby figures, in spite of the tragic consequences of their operations. Perhaps we now tend to think that Lessing was a bit too optimistic about the harmlessness of the terrorist drive, by not giving us access to their more professional endeavors. In any case, the strictly realistic mode of her novel is arguably more adequate for the narration of the youth’s everyday activities than of the terror itself, which curiously becomes virtually normalized by the conventional narrative form, becoming just one occasion among many others. Random deaths do not signify anything in particular to the activists, at least nothing that a quote from Lenin and a competent rationalization could not wipe away. In consequence, what we obviously

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witness is exactly the early days of killing idle emotions, in order to be able to kill without any emotions. Alice, the female protagonist, muses upon the situation after the killings: “After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had certainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk, the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terrorists” (452). Interestingly, Lessing points out that her activists’ way of life was not, in point of fact, oriented to achieve any recognizable political objectives. Instead, it was the good feelings of the narcissist-as-activist, spending brilliant days in picketing and shouting at the police, getting kicks out of resisting and escaping the police, or even getting arrested, the excitement of transgressing the borderlines between the permissible and the forbidden, the legal and the illegal. The sheer fact of escaping the police renders activists, in their own imagination, as dangerous and important. Learning the allegedly sublime pleasures of transgression, even to the point of enjoying killing people was, of course, essential for the education of Nazi officers as well as the globe-trotting terrorists of Rushdie’s novel. Crime fiction has for a long time investigated such serial crimes as rape and murder from the perspective of the particularly addictive and subjectivity-creating excitement generated by the transgression of these boundaries. Imagining with a Terrorist? Literature has its methods of bringing fictional characters closer to the reader than we often are able to get in normal life. The point of view, or focalization (Genette 1980; Jahn 2007, for a more recent discussion), within a character may be one way; letting one of the characters narrate the story is another. Such a culturally and politically diverse, agonistic situation as the recent wave of fundamentalist terrorism, of course, inflicts difficult challenges upon authors. Doris Lessing’s expert narration, if mainly ironic and sardonic, on the thoughts, action, and speech of her activists is based on a shared cultural background and knowledge about leftist movements. As Manfred Jahn reminds us, the whole modernist literature needed the background of an emerging psychology to present the fictional streams of consciousness. But how does this understanding work across violent cultural boundaries? John Updike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Salman Rushdie (2005) face a much larger challenge, of course. Their attempts to let us, the readers, imagine the thoughts and emotions of contemporary terrorists are, of course, as tricky as they are politically relevant.

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However, it is again a trap to see the world divided between the Western “us” and the “terrorists” and their supporters. As a matter of fact, John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) plays expertly with such expectations of the reader. In the beginning, there is a sloppy Jew, an all-too-liberal white mother, seductive and flirtatious American girls, and a widening Muslim front to support, educate, and manipulate the dedicated fighter. A great deal of the pleasures of reading the novel comes from the sudden realization, by the end of the novel, of an entirely different picture with nuances and a plurality of distinctions. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is one of the bravest attempts to see the whole issue from a not-so-self-evident North American point of view. Hamid’s narrator, a young man coming from Pakistan to study at Princeton (like Hamid himself ), succeeds in landing a job in a thriving financial enterprise. It is in this line of work where economic “fundamentals” need to be taken into account, and other—human, ecological, and whatever—lesser considerations to be ignored. A politically oriented reader may still be slightly perplexed by parts of Hamid’s novel. His narrator lives in New York City and is entirely dedicated to his work in the financial sector. As 9/11 is about to occur, he is finalizing his first big business assignment in the Philippines, and watches the events unfold on television. He says, “I stared as one—and the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. . . . But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack— death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes—no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees” (72, 73).This passage contains a few disquieting contradictions. The narrator had never before announced any reservations in his relationship with “America” (a term the Canadians, among many other Americans, may find inconvenient in this context). On the other hand, between the dashes he presents himself as a relatively naïve and apolitical reader of the media. Yet he immediately knows how to react to the figures of destruction exclusively on the symbolic level of the event. The reading of the situation may differ from many hegemonic versions, but it certainly concurs with the Bush administration in one regard: by seeing the event within a clear-cut national frame. But within this chosen nationalistic frame, celebrating America on her knees, this reading again appears helplessly naïve, while not seeing in the event itself the seeds for horrors to come as its natural consequence. Later, when the “big” America attacks “small” Afghanistan, the previously light-hearted observer is full of moral rectitude. After allowing himself a nationalistic reading of the event, the narrator becomes a purist after returning to New York. He states, “Your country’s flag invaded New

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York after the attacks; it was everywhere. Small flags stuck on toothpicks featured in the shrines; stickers of flags adorned windshields and windows; large flags fluttered from buildings. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America— not New York, which, in my opinion, means something quite different” (79). Hamid’s narrator here has different political and ethical standards for New Yorkers and himself. He can be exhilarated by the symbolic fall of “America,” but New Yorkers should not see the event happening to or in America. In fact, Siri Hustvedt (2006, 124) has offered quite a different reading of the meaning of the flags as well. Brockmeier (2008), in his study of actual responses to the trauma of 9/11, notes that patriotic and nationalist reactions, so popular in the media and politics—and in the rest of the country—were truly marginal among individual responses in New York City. Whereas DeLillo, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Spiegelman, among many others, systematically resist nationalist readings of terror and terrorism, Hamid’s position remains problematic despite his criticism of America. Hamid’s work is one of those that foreground the media representation as a real political event. Rather uncannily, Brett Easton Ellis (1998) obliterated the borderlines between film and the novel’s “real-life” events in his paranoid terrorist world of Glamorama to the ultimate extent possible. Film crews in this novel are mysteriously already ever-present and shooting raw footage when bombs are delivered and exploded in Prada or Gucci bags. Is the narrator Victor Ward too strung out on a combination of drugs, always including Xanax, a medication for panic attacks, to make a difference between fiction, glamorous show life, and a vicious terrorist plan? Or do we witness a terrorist network of top models along with their assemblage of the best brand name products—and nearly always in front of photographers and film crews—with its paranoid plans to create maximum havoc? Ellis’s terrorists combine the glamorous public presence in front of cameras, high-quality technical expertise in camouflage, and terrorist attacks with a renouncement of empathy for victims and an obvious enjoyment of torture. All players have double or triple agendas, leaving Victor Ward and the reader betrayed in their search for final clarity and closure. This cursory review on parts of the recent literature on terror is most of all meant to emphasize the relevance of studying the arts in the context of terror. There are many other novels to consider, such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). In his The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee (1994) revisits Dostoyevsky’s classical crime scene, discussed more thoroughly by Margaret Heller in Chapter 4 of this volume, that naturally evokes the nineteenth-century genre of literature focused on St. Petersburg—originally brought to life by Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman of 1833.2 There are entire genres such as crime stories and science fiction to be examined, not

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to mention film and photography. The recent artistic interest in terror is engendering ideas, images, and dilemmas awaiting more thorough, interdisciplinary investigation, quite apart from its educational potential. Terror in our Midst In a book penned over a quarter of a century ago, Marshall Berman eloquently and passionately defended The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels as “the first great modernist work of art” (1983, 102). And like all great books, Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity is possibly even more compelling today than when it was first published. It is especially relevant now, when the cold war era has given way to something that it perhaps helped to spawn in its own wake, which has now taken its place on a global scale. Indeed, the idea of “terror in our midst” is certainly not new; what is new about it is its seeming all-pervasiveness. It has come out into the open, followed closely in its wake by a global media that amplifies it, making it into something that is no longer occurring only on the shabby back streets of a distant region, where it was ignored: unseen and unheard. Terror has, in any case, moved to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Indeed, since the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has spread to the downtown streets of Jerusalem, Moscow, London, and New York. As Berman observed nearly three decades ago, the thrust of modernism(s) and the process of modernization has carried us along the crest of a wave in time where “modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities. . . . It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first” (1983, 21, 36). In the spirit of such an outlook, looking forward by looking back—or something resembling a “circle” of time—what the chapters of this collection do not attempt to do with the theme of terror and the arts is to plumb the depths of an originating despair and emptiness that may have motivated acts of terror, whether 150 years ago on the streets of St. Petersburg or during the last few years on the streets of London or New York. And likewise, the authors of this volume are not interested in examining what art and terror may share intimately in common with one another below the surface of any work of art. Perhaps it is DeLillo’s figure of David Janiak in Falling Man that explores just such a tension, given that Janiak is not only an artist, but that he

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is also “arrested at various times,” which both complicates and overshadows his “art” with the illicit flavor of the terror/trauma he repeats through his horrifying jumps. Rather, from the starting points of painting, photography, literature, film, and so on, we will explore what the arts may offer by way of different readings of terror and trauma, readings that do not celebrate the violence inherent in much of art, but politically motivated readings that endeavor to resist the exploitation and persistence of violence by confronting it with courage and the desire to “work through” it—to look it in the face and see beyond the shattered present. The method is thus one in which “going back can be a way to go forward”—in a circular fashion that attempts to go beyond the “meanings” culled from the surface of linear time and chronological events. In short, the method at hand is not about going “back” in linear fashion at all, for as Eelco Runia observes, “Being moved by the past comes . . . in two modalities: a ‘regressive’ and a ‘revolutionary’ one. In both the ‘regressive’ and the ‘revolutionary’ mode linearity is adjourned and exposed and a primordial ‘circularity’ reclaims its rights” in an existence where “time is not a line but a knot, not a river but a whirlpool, not progression but circulation” (2007a, 1; Runia 2006, esp. 6–7). At a glance, then, this volume begins with an exploration of the visual arts in Part 1: Visualizing Terror, where each of the three chapters of this section offer three different dimensions of the problematic relationship between terror and the visual arts, ranging from the aestheticization of violence to the “aura” of the resulting images. The main message here is about coming to grips with, in some cases, quite disturbing images, whereas the third chapter offers Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic theory as a way in which to capture and anchor the phenomenon from a theoretical standpoint. There is, in any case, a long-standing relationship between literature and terror, a phenomenon well known in the West since at least the mid-nineteenth century, represented in Part 2: Fictionalizing Terror. It is in this second section, moreover, that the relationship between literature and terror faces possible reevaluation in light of the “manifold and the heterogeneous” provenance of events within their own times and places that have inspired novelists on themes of violence and terror, both past and present, in an effort—as Runia remarks—to capture something “that is absent from our own mythology, the past that is withheld verbally, the past . . . that waits to be made sense of ” (2006, 8). This second section of the volume is then followed by the perspective of governmental terror, in Part 3, regarding policies regulating the arts not only in Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution, but also seen in a comparative

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light between the little studied nondemocratic states of Ceaus¸escu’s Romania and Pinochet’s Chile—in the two decades preceding the inadvertently common downfall of their dictatorships in 1989. This third section also momentarily fixes on a single work of art within the frame of Western political theory by way of “discussing community and responsibility as political-ethical criteria.” The third essay of this section thus brings out subtleties of short-sighted policy choices to the extraordinary trauma and tragedy of an anytown, anywhere, by ordinary people in a nondictatorial setting, helping to illuminate the ways in which we entrap ourselves in positions we might otherwise reject—or even embrace—if we had only had the perspective of hindsight, or foresight for that matter, to have acted differently. It is in this third section of the book that “politics” and “the arts” stand in starkest contrast to one another and invokes Robert Musil’s observation in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities): “Only now I understand . . . why we soldiers, who are accustomed to the greatest order, must be prepared to give our lives at each and every moment. . . . Somehow or other, order, once it reaches a certain stage, calls for bloodshed” (Musil in Runia 2007b, 1). In the final section, The Terror of Theory, the point of view steps away from the political confrontations of the previous section to an analysis of the effects of terror for political theory tout court. As a capping stone, therefore, Part 4 functions as a way to engage these issues in terms of unveiling hidden consequences for political and social theory, generally, as well as how this might work out in the lives of individual persons facing the “new reality” in the aftermath of 9/11. This section thus addresses Musil’s sharp awareness that “order, once it reaches a certain stage, calls for bloodshed” and seeks ways out of such a dilemma. Thus, engagement with the photographs of Abu Ghraib, in the very first chapter—although a recent event from a chronological standpoint—provides the initial thread that is woven throughout all these essays, and taken up by the two concluding essays that seek an exit from the vicious circle of violence and aggression. Visualizing Terror Introducing the collection in Chapter 1, “The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero,” Frank Möller argues that, contrary to photographs of war, famine, atrocities, and myriad forms of human suffering, the limits of photography are not the limits of art. Prefacing his argument, he begins with the historical instance of the Edouard Manet painting, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867), “one of the finest examples ever of political art,” which Möller characterizes as political, because it indeed complicated rather than

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simplified the “facts” of the execution, and was therefore “insusceptible to simple interpretations.” By such means, Möller argues, it maintained its autonomy as a work of art. In identifying the nature of the tension between art and the violence that it depicts in this historical example, he cuts to the volatile discussion on the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, in light of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings. Möller carefully shows how art exceeds the limits of the “real” image and subsequently provides an added dimension that emphasizes the utility and value of the arts vis-à-vis terror, in part due to the huge discussion that these images-as-art unleashed. Such engagement with these images enable us to “establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims”—as human beings, and not merely as prisoners outside the aegis of the Geneva Convention.3 Right on Möller’s heels, Dana Arieli-Horowitz offers us “Art in the Age of Terror: The Israeli Case” in Chapter 2, where she examines the treatment of art, in which the presence and theme of terror is understandably prominent. In light of the ongoing acts of terror in Israel known, consecutively, as the first and second Intifada—experienced by both Israeli and Palestinian societies over a period of four years (2000–4)—she sees the artistic response of Israeli artists as a way of working through “cultural trauma,” following the terminology of the noted sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander. This move thus allows Arieli-Horowitz to reinterpret the “aesthetization” of terror as a psychological coping mechanism in which “the vast majority of artists within a community react to a specific event,” such as the consecutive phases of the Intifada in the Israeli case, featuring a number of these images as illustrations for the reader. It is from such a vantage point that Arieli-Horowitz faces the controversial question as to whether and to what extent we can view acts of terror as containing an aesthetic dimension. Such an analysis may help to further extend Möller’s opening chapter and, indeed, provide another dimension within which to ground Möller’s own claims for the dynamic tension between the two registers of ethics and aesthetics. In Chapter 3, “The Aura of Terror?” Kia Lindroos offers us a substantive theoretical discussion on the aesthetics of historical and contemporary images as political experiences, merged with the memories of both present and past simultaneously. She does this, first, by opening with Roland Barthes’s engagement with a photograph of his dead mother at the beginning of Camera Lucida and, thereafter, proceeds to conduct us expertly through “the temporal epistemology of the image,” using Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” in light of the systematic distribution of fear and horror that terror inspires. This perspective allows her to maneuver toward the important question of how the viewer is drawn to the event in the representation of terror images in the first

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place and, in so doing, thus provides the theoretical anchor to the section as a whole—bolstering and underlying the discussions of the preceding chapters by Arieli-Horowitz and Möller. Fictionalizing Terror This second section offers a selection of articles on the subject of literature in response to terror, which mirrors the previous section insofar as these chapters are still coming to grips with the tension between violence and its artistic representation. These four chapters begin with Margaret Heller’s reminder in Chapter 4 that art and terror indeed have a long relationship in the literature of the West, starting from perhaps the most famous example of such literature: Dostoyevsky’s—once again vogue—novel that highlights the activities and internal dynamics of a terrorist cell in The Possessed (1872). Indeed, Heller’s “Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West” confronts the different types of terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia and concludes with her own concern to reevaluate Dostoyevsky’s novel for the political ideas that commentators, including Dostoyevsky himself, have thus far claimed for it— thereby bringing into doubt that it now means what it used to for all concerned, particularly in light of contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism. By deconstructing the category of the “West” in this context, she problematizes the means “through which modern evil can be externalized and essentialized.” From Dostoyevsky’s engagement with terror, we shift forwards in time to one of the most notorious cases of public violence and terror in recent European memory, that of Nazi Germany and the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, in “To This Side of Good and Evil: Primo Levi as a Truth-teller,” Tuija Parvikko launches an original thesis in Chapter 5 by putting aside the usual juridical reading of Nazi genocide and embracing, instead, a political reading. Such a viewpoint, as it turns out, allows her to get beyond the strictly black and white juxtaposition of “innocent victim” versus the “evil perpetrators” (the wellexplored perspective), for the express purpose of understanding both the survivors and the participants in the debate over the Holocaust as “politicians.”4 For this purpose, Parvikko takes the (Barthesian) position of Hayden White, who interprets the Holocaust as a “modernist event,” and contrasts this with the interpretation of Giorgio Agamben, who argues the impossibility of integral testimony, by way of Primo Levi’s reports about Auschwitz. This strategy thus positions her to suggest that Levi can be understood as an Arendtian “truth-teller,” on the basis of which important issues are not necessarily coming directly out of one’s own personal experience, but rather on the basis of seeking the truth in the fight against silence, evasion, and

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lying in a world where telling the truth—as she argues—has become “political action.” Parvikko’s thesis thus provides a relevant departure point for the next chapter, in which Kuisma Korhonen examines Georges Perec’s autobiographical novel W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1974). Standing at the heart of Korhonen’s study in Chapter 6, “Narrating the Trauma: Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenier d’enfance,” is Perec’s dovetailing text, which at first appears to be a story about an island, in one typeface, with a supposedly autobiographical text, printed in a separate typeface on the page, as the story weaves back and forth between what looks like that of a narrator and his straightforward description of a distant and unusual place. What eventually becomes clear, however, is that ‘W’ turns out to be a metaphor for Auschwitz and the dovetailing texts themselves (supposedly between two distinct stories) merge as a Freudian method for dealing with childhood trauma. If we recall, in this context, the figure of the Arendtian truth-teller from Parvikko’s chapter, we might agree with Korhonen that, although Perec makes clear that all his childhood memories are unreliable, it is nonetheless fair to conclude the manner in which Perec’s text serves as a guide, or map, through the labyrinth of traumatic memories. Korhonen thus assesses “fictional truth” in this context through the parallels and resonances of experience that is brought to bear on author and reader alike. In this sense, Korhonen’s insight echoes that of Parvikko’s, because this “fictional truth” (between author and reader) can be interpreted as another way of “seeking the truth in the fight against silence, evasion, and lying in a world where telling the truth has become political action.” Fitting right into this vein of observation is Chapter 7 by Matti Hyvärinen, entitled “Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and the Circulation of Trauma.” Here, Hyvärinen analyzes J. M. Coetzee’s recent novel Elizabeth Costello and the manner in which this Nobel prize-winning novelist sets the reader up for a straightforward and predictable, one-to-one correspondence of the text with his “own, personal” political viewpoint— concerning the highly charged theme of good and evil, specifically regarding the ethical fallout around the theme of the Holocaust. However, once the reader is nicely in hand and situated with certain basic expectations, Coetzee then systematically undermines these expectations in manifold and surprising ways. Hyvärinen therefore concludes that the reader is left with Coetzee’s open-ended trajectory of “possibility” and no firm, concrete one-to-one correspondence or final interpretation, leading to the distinct impression that Coetzee’s outlook might well reflect that of Perec in the preceding chapter by Korhonen. It would thus appear that the political nature of all three of these analyses is that of the Arendtian truth-teller, thereby perhaps substantiating

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Parvikko’s claim that telling the truth “may yet become one of the most important modes of political action in the twenty-first century.” If true, moreover, “telling the truth” as political action comes very close to Andrei Bely’s symbolist solution in his novel Petersburg. Indeed, the alternative and (only) successful means for navigating around within Bely’s “city of shadows,” suffering from (modernist) “illness and flu,” was to acquire “the shadow passport” (Bely 1983, 206ff.; 1995, 404ff.); indeed, Berman picks up Bely’s key insight and concludes: The Petersburg influenza infuses the air of New York, of Milan, of Stockholm, of Tokyo, of Tel Aviv, and it blows on and on. . . . The Petersburg tradition . . . can provide them with shadow passports into the unreal reality of the modern city. And it can inspire them with visions of symbolic action and interaction that can help them to act as men and citizens there: modes of passionately intense encounter and conflict and dialogue through which they can at once assert themselves and confront each other . . . to become, as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man claimed . . . to be, both personally and politically “more alive” in the elusively shifting light and shadow of the city streets. (Berman 1983, 286)

Governmental Terror The third section of this book addresses societies and situations justly characterized as lying “in deep shadow,” in the Belian sense, where outright lies and deception at the level of state policy, or community politics, created “unreal cities” and environments that raises the concept of “terror” to new levels. It opens with Chapter 8, “Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (1974–89),” by the Romanian scholar, Caterina Preda, who focuses on the neglected study of art and politics in the nondemocratic cases of Latin America and Eastern Europe (Chile and Romania, respectively). Preda asks two interrelated questions, “What is the relationship between art and politics in a nondemocratic regime?” And, secondly, “How is art used by nondemocratic regimes as a method/technique of ideologization?” Her conclusions lead to the distinctions between art and politics in an “authoritarian” society of the right (Chile) in contrast to that of a “totalitarian” society of the left (Romania), respectively—where the ideological “mood” (whether of the right or left) is nevertheless eviscerated by its universally violent “mode.” This, in turn, provides timely insight for Minna Valjakka’s “Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control: Chinese Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).” Thus, in Chapter 9, Valjakka shows that these art-cum-propaganda tools were the most favored

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way of spreading the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution, where Valjakka’s main aim is to inquire into how different themes of art were used as instruments of mass manipulation in this totalitarian society, and how the masses, in turn, reacted. The fallout of inculcating ideology by way of mental-terror-as-government-policy, moreover, is similar to the reaction of Israeli artists in Chapter 2, “working through” a collective trauma, where one Chinese artist reveals, “What I have done is pull down this image from the pantheon to reality. Working on Mao is one way to extricate myself from the nightmare; first I felt sinful and fearful, now I feel nothing.” Such an observation goes a long way in demonstrating the difference between random terror inflicted upon strangers in the street, and systematic terror aimed at a populace that, in its aftermath, can only feel “violated and used” by those purporting to lead and protect. In Chapter 10, Javier Franzé’s “The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber: Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria” picks up on this theme and explicitly investigates it outside the authoritarian/totalitarian context. On the basis of the 1997 Atom Egoyan film, The Sweet Hereafter, Franzé emphasizes the fact that in the hypothetical “real world” of film, we are removed from the abstract and hypothetical context of the written word—on a two-dimensional surface—to find ourselves in the midst of the same ethical dilemmas, among living people, in a three-dimensional world where simple, black-and-white arguments no longer suffice. Franzé thereby shows that, with film, traditional issues and their arguments can literally be cast in a new (cinematic) light that emphasizes both the utility and value of exposing traditionally textbook issues to other formats, such as the arts—and especially film—for their detailed exploration. It is here in Franzé’s essay that this dynamic tension between ethics and aesthetics is once again clearly juxtaposed, again mirroring Arieli-Horowitz’s observation of the important role of art as a channel for “working through” grief and trauma. The Terror of Theory This final section of the book picks up the preceding thread provided by the chapters on governmental terror, here brought forward in the final two chapters by Olivia Guaraldo in Chapter 11, and Lauri Siisiäinen in Chapter 12. Taking the lead here, Guaraldo’s chapter, “The Violence of Lying,” boldly sets out a critique of (Western) individualism by way of Hannah Arendt’s reading of the leaked Pentagon Papers in introducing a story that vaguely echoes Valjakka’s chapter on the Chinese government’s systematic campaign to present a “false reality” for the sake of keeping up appearances. Ultimately

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invoking the work of the feminist theorists Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero, Guaraldo calls into question the “immunitarian function” of modern politics, where the tradition of natural law (Hobbes’s “protego ergo obligo”), that is, obedience in exchange for protection, has been made obsolete. Guaraldo argues with Arendt, who “attempts . . . to abandon the political fictive entity of man, the individual, the subject,” leaving the way open for the “irreducible differences that qualify each human being . . . related to others.” In this manner, the isolated, atomized figure of the “immune” individual is a fictitious entity and thereby provides the basis for a new anthropological model resituated in the Bulterian “vulnerable self ” that is necessarily confronted by and exposed to others. Such an entity would provide the basis of a new political aesthetic wherein “truth-telling” might help see its way clear in the new century to break out of the vicious circle of violence that lying in politics engenders—as Musil observed so acutely, “order,” however established (from the right or from the left, as Preda demonstrates), somehow always calls for “bloodshed.” In this final chapter of the book, “Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art,” Lauri Siisiäinen turns a seldomaddressed question inside out, by challenging the idea that the ear, sound, hearing, and music fundamentally terrorize the modern political community. In other words, such elements are considered a threat to the Occidental tradition of political philosophy, which normally prides itself as being founded on reason and subjective autonomy. Surprisingly, however, Siisiäinen strikes a positive note in this context. Through the prism of Michel Foucault’s late work on “care of the self ”—which would be the sensibility of the “vulnerable self ” of the previous chapter—suggests that far from posing a threat to the modern political community, such characteristics offered by “auditory” or “sonorous” politics might help to provide the departure point for constructive conflict, intervention, seizure, and change. Indeed, few commentators have picked up on this in Foucault’s work. In the end, moreover, this embraces contingency and the unknown in a way that plays upon Parvikko’s emphasis on the middle voice, or intransitive writing.5 What this collection therefore pursues from the perspectives of visual studies, literature, historiography, political thought, and philosophy, is to excavate hitherto unseen dimensions of problems of the present, not merely the “what” on the surface of time that demands a clear “meaning” that “makes sense,” but rather to realize that time is also a “knot” wherein “the march of chronicity is interrupted, and past, present and future start to dance in a circle—a dance in which each of the dancers is spurred on by one of the others and bites the tail of the third” (Runia 2007a, 1). From such a perspective, it

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is possible to see the way in which the era of terror is not overwhelmingly inevitable and irresolvable. Rather, by deliberately invoking Berman’s sense of the “possible”—of acquiring a “shadow passport” and stripping away our collective and private illusions alike—we might see this present age as having an innate potential for shearing away the veil of logic and “sense making” that ultimately shields us from ourselves and a deeper “sense of reality.” Indeed, Barthes serves as an example of this “shearing process” when he looks into the picture of his dead mother and is caught unawares and pierced to the heart, not by any objective “meaning” that could be derived from the photograph in his hand, but by the sudden sense of “presence” it so strongly evokes as one of the loopholes in the circularity of time. Reading the Arts Politically The basic assumption informing this book has been that there are no such self-evident entities as “political art” or “political literature.” Rather, the idea of reading the arts politically—whatever this means exactly—and reading it politically in nonreductive ways has guided this project. What this means in the final analysis, and what it does not, goes beyond the present limits of this introduction. In this vein, Susan Sontag’s critical stance against interpretation, originally from 1964, is just as acute now as it was then. She writes, “In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable” (Sontag 1987, 8). Sontag attacks all attempts to reduce the arts to their “content” or “meaning,” and qualifies all such projects as the taming of the arts. It is true, in any case, that the structuralist narratology of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing mainly on the form of the artwork, was able to develop far more “scientifically” oriented methods of interpretation (see, for example, Fludernik 2005). Nonetheless, Sontag’s main point is still valid enough, if we think in terms of political theorists. There is no direct way to the “content,” and interpretations without sensitivity to the forms of the artwork often tend to slip into reductionism. Sontag nearly forecloses the whole possibility of political reading by arguing that what “we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought” (14). Is this present volume of essays committing precisely this mistake? This, again, may be read as a warning against reading the arts only as an illustration of principles of thought, be it philosophy, social theory, or aesthetics. However, there is hardly any reason to aggravate the modern

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professional division of work between the arts and scholarship. One way out of this dilemma may be a reading strategy Dominick LaCapra (1995) has suggested for historians, and what he calls “dialogical.” He writes, “Basic to it is a power of provocation or an exchange that has the effect of testing assumptions, legitimating those that stand its critical test and preparing others for change” (824). LaCapra rejects in his dialogical approach the temptation of “the redemptive reading” (of Clifford Geerz or Charles Taylor) to recover the whole “meaning” of history or artwork. A challenge, dialogue, and even a provocative testing of it may allocate the artwork the “capacity to make us nervous,” as Sontag puts it (1987, 8). Political reading should not, therefore, aim at the closure of “interpretation” or “analysis” of the work, but rather aim toward a dialogue wherein the work of art retains its power to challenge the preexisting theories, be they political, philosophical, or literary. Because of this dialogical tension, there obviously cannot be one standard strategy for reading politically. Nevertheless, there is one apparent consequence of this metaphor of reading the arts politically. That is, in making the political dimension of the arts relevant, the readers themselves participate in the artistic-cum-political process, and they do so in such a manner that makes possible the “revolution” of viewpoints that LaCapra’s dialogical conception articulates. References Auster, Paul. 1987. In the country of last things. New York: Penguin. ———. 1992. Leviathan. London: Faber and Faber. Bely, Andrei. 1916/1995. Petersburg. Trans. David McDuff. London: Penguin. ———. 1916/1983. Petersburg. Trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad. London: Penguin. Original translation, with notes and introduction for Indiana University Press, 1978. Berman, Marshall. 1983. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. London and New York: Verso. Brockmeier, Jens. 2008. Language, experience, and the “traumatic gap”: How to talk about 9/11? In Health, illness and culture: Broken narratives, ed. L.-C. Hydén and J. Brockmeier. New York: Routledge. Burke, Peter. 2005. History and social theory. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity. DeLillo, Don. 2007. Falling man. New York: Scribner. Ellis, Brett Easton. 2000. Glamorama. New York: Vintage Books. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. Histories on narrative theory (II): From structuralism to the present. In A companion to narrative theory, ed. J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz, 36–59. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2006. Extremely loud & incredibly close. London: Penguin.

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Foucault, Michel. 1972/1997. The archaeology of knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative discourse. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell. Original edition, “Discourse du Recit,” a portion of Figures III, Editions du Seuil 1972. Hamid, Mohsin. 2007. The reluctant fundamentalist. Orlando: Harcourt. Hustvedt, Siri. 2006. A plea for eros. London: Hoddon and Soughton. Jahn, Manfred. 2007. Focalization. In The Cambridge companion to narrative, ed. D. Herman, 94–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ———. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1995. History, language, and reading: Waiting for Crillon. American Historical Review 100 (3): 799–828. Lessing, Doris. 1986. The good terrorist. New York: Vintage. McEwan, Ian. 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. Meehan, Patricia. 2007. Cruel Allied occupiers. The New York Review 54 (16): 20–24. Ondaatje, Michael. 2001. Anil’s ghost. Toronto: Random House. Runia, Eelco. 2007a. Can the past remember us? Paper presented at the colloquium Moved by the Past, September 27–28, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. ———. 2007b. Into cleanness leaping: The primacy of the deed in history and literature. Invited lecture given May 31, Stanford University, United States. ———. 2006. Presence. History and Theory 45 (1): 1–29. Rushdie, Salman. 2006. Shalimar the clown. New York: Random House. Sontag, Susan. 1977/1987. Against interpretation. London: André Deutsch. Spiegelman, Art. 2004. In the shadow of no towers. London: Penguin. Updike, John. 2006. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Vivian, Bradford. 2004. Being made strange: Rhetoric beyond representation. New York: SUNY Press. Volkov, Solomon. 1997. St. Petersburg: A cultural history. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Free Press.

Notes 1. We thank Pekka Tammi for this observation. 2. Published in 1837, Pushkin’s (1799–1837) poem fused the mythos of the city St. Petersburg with that of its founder, Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), in the image of a large, bronze equestrian statue by Etienne Maurice Falconet, commissioned by Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96). This statue was subsequently unveiled at the center of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva River in Senate Square in 1782. Dressed in a Roman toga and crowned with a laurel wreath, Peter sits astride a rearing steed, the likes of which Pushkin finally immortalized by placing at the center of his poem—a metonymy-cum-emblem that captured

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all the latent ambiguity regarding the country’s destiny and the “fate of its capital,” fused together in Pushkin’s poetic imagination (Volkov 1997, xi; see also Bely 1983, 323–24). And although Gogol and Dostoyevsky, to name just two of the most well-known of the Russian cultural elite to follow Pushkin’s lead in featuring St. Petersburg at the center of their works (as a metaphorical tension between East and West), it is the Silver Age’s Symbolist poet of the 1910s, Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev [1880–1934]), who authored one of the twentieth century’s great modernist novels, Petersburg (1983, 1995, both based on the 1916 Russian edition). For the purpose of the present introduction, moreover, the singular symbolic feature of this novel, framed during the Russian revolutionary year of 1905, is that of two students posited at its “spherical” center—would-be terrorists on different trajectories, echoing the different “modernizing” trajectories of Russia herself (Bely 1983, 324). As the translators point out, “the structure of the novel as a whole is circular . . . In short, we find ourselves moving further and further back in time and space, only to experience other beginnings and other returns. The ending of the novel seems ambiguous . . . but there can be no real endings for Bely. The world of his novel is a living organism, which constantly renews itself and which makes mockery of man’s efforts to cut it to his own limited horizons” (Bely 1983, xxi). 3. Moreover, the overwhelming controversy that the Abu Ghraib photos manifested has given rise to new publications that review and disseminate knowledge of similar reprehensible behavior exhibited by American (and British) soldiers also in the past, including Giles MacDonogh’s recently published After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, reviewed by historian Patricia Meehan (2007). If the images from the Abu Ghraib prison had not been so widely available and provoked such an outcry (opening up an otherwise wellhidden topic), MacDonogh’s book might not have found its public so easily— or found it so receptive to such a disturbing message. 4. Peter Burke (2005, 21–43) would perhaps point out here that this former, more usual juridical viewpoint is but one way of establishing elements in a model for one particular examination of the Holocaust. In such a light, another perspective, that of the political, is still ripe for a new construal of familiar evidence in manifesting new observations and, perhaps, in coming to previously unanticipated conclusions. 5. Bradford Vivian (2004) makes the case for the middle voice from the point of view of rhetoric (as opposed, for example, to that of literary theory), which is, furthermore, developed on the basis of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1997). Vivian’s text clarifies the common thread of Foucault’s oeuvre as being “the status of the subject, not as an essential identity, but as a dispersion of difference” (Vivian 2004, 197n6) and, in a systematic presentation, illuminates the value of the middle voice as a tool with which to break open discourse in any domain, as is in abundant evidence in a majority of the preceding chapters of this collection.

PART 1

Visualizing Terror

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CHAPTER 1

The Implicated Spectator From Manet to Botero Frank Möller

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hotographs of war, famines, atrocities, and other forms of human suffering may aestheticize suffering and anaesthetize emotions. Quite regardless of the photographer’s intention, they often fail to trigger a political response to that which they depict. Indeed, photographs are often accused of having a dulling and desensitizing effect, reflecting processes of habituation and self-protection on the part of the viewers who might read them as evidence of their own political and moral failure to prevent this very suffering. However, “the limits of photography are not the limits of art” (Danto 2006) and photography is not as limited as it is often accused of being.1 Querétaro, June 19, 1867 The execution of emperor Maximilian of Mexico on June 19, 1867, brought to an end a remarkable example of colonial folly: France’s policy in Mexico of what nowadays is called regime change begun side by side with Britain and Spain in January 1862 allegedly to make Mexico pay its foreign debt. While Spain and Britain had sufficient wits to withdraw quickly from this adventure, the French troops stayed in Mexico and were, in Puebla on May 5, 1862, utterly defeated by Benito Juárez’s forces—an event still celebrated today in Mexico as Cinco de Mayo. In 1864, Napoleon the Third helped install emperor Franz Joseph of Austria’s brother Maximilian—whose position as governor of Lombardy-Venetia had become redundant after the French invasion of Italy in 1859—as emperor of Mexico, making him believe

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that he would be welcomed in Mexico to represent the constitutional, hereditary monarchy that was established in July 1863 by an Assembly of Notables in Mexico City after Juárez had been forced to flee to the north. Napoleon, while refusing to guarantee Mexico’s territorial integrity, promised Maximilian limited military support that exacerbated Mexico’s disastrous financial situation without supporting Maximilian when help was most needed. Realizing both the increasing unpopularity of France’s engagement in Mexico and the end of the American Civil War (that increased the danger of an American engagement on Juárez’s side) and annoyed at Austria’s refusal to build an alliance with France, Napoleon abandoned Maximilian in January 1866 by withdrawing French troops from Mexico. Maximilian, to a large extent uninformed of Mexico’s politics and society while oscillating between liberal and repressive policies, refused to abdicate. He was court-martialed and, together with his generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía (long-time foes of Juárez) and despite international protest, executed after the surrender of his remaining troops to Juárez’s forces at Querétaro on June 19, 1867. News of the execution reached Europe in early July and considerably inconvenienced Napoleon. It was a personal defeat since it was he who, three years earlier, had persuaded Maximilian to take the throne of Mexico. The arrival of news of Maximilian’s execution also coincided with the prize-giving ceremony’s opening at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, surely intended to celebrate France’s greatness. Instead, “painful news,” as L’Indépendance Belge put it on July 1, 1867, disturbed the ceremony. The news caused, in Le Mémorial Diplomatique’s assessment two days later, “a painful emotion in Europe” (Elderfield 2006, 183), but also “arguably the most ambitious work by the era’s most important artist” (Rubinstein 2007, 101), one of the greatest achievements in nineteenth century painting, and one of the finest examples ever of political art, Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. This painting should not be considered as an important example of political art because the painter made a clear political statement either for or against the execution, for or against Maximilian’s installation as emperor, for or against France’s role in the whole debacle. This is far from clear. The painting should also not be considered as an important example of political art because it realistically and accurately depicted what had actually happened in Querétaro on June 19, 1867. Although to some extent resuscitating the genre of history painting, it does not seem to have been Manet’s intention to create a traditional historical painting. He did gather and study as much information on the execution as possible. He decided, however, to incorporate some parts of the information into his painting while ignoring others. Information

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on the details of the execution was ambivalent, contradictory, and unreliable anyway. Furthermore, rather than purely aiming at a documentary approach to the execution scene, Manet’s practice of painting and repainting was also a lesson in intervisuality, that is, the application and alteration of the rules, established by such artists as Francisco de Goya, governing the painting of current and historical events. Rather, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian is to be seen as political art because it cannot be diminished to a single meaning; it complicates not simplifies (Elderfield 2006, 44), is insusceptible to simple interpretations, and cannot be easily used for political purposes, thereby maintaining its autonomy as a work of art. This can also, and perhaps especially, be said with respect to what is usually considered as and diminished to an unfinished, preparatory study, a fullsize painted sketch (an ébauche) of considerable dimension (6 feet 5.125 inches ǂ 8 feet 6.25 inches / 195.9 ǂ 259.7 centimeters) titled Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. This painting was done under the influence of early news arriving from Mexico, subsequently to some extent adapted to newly incoming snippets of knowledge that outlined in more detail the act of execution. The painting, currently owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, might be unfinished, but it is powerful all the same. However, without the painting’s title, without additional knowledge of the events in Mexico, and without the two following large-scale paintings that are more clearly identifiable as paintings of Maximilian’s execution—the one, preserved only in the form of several fragments, on show today at the National Gallery, London, the other at Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim2—it would be very difficult to identify the object of the painting. It is a rather opaque execution scene. Only the fact that some of the figures (most prominently one of the victims and the noncommissioned officer [NCO] waiting for the coup de grace) appear to have been depicted as wearing hats resembling sombreros gives some clues as to the geographical location of the scene. Other figures are wearing kepis, resembling caps prevalent in the French army, and others a curious combination of kepis and sombreros. This combination indicates, perhaps, a deMexiconization of the painting and accusations against the French involvement in the affair, both increasing in the course of repainting, or just reflects the uncertainties and contradictions of the incoming information as to the soldiers’ headgear; the same could be said with respect to the uniforms. Except for the lower left part of the painting (sand, perhaps; straw, perhaps), the scene is basically dark and the number of figures cannot clearly be discerned. The firing squad is painted as a cluster of anonymous, partly amalgamated bodies rather than as individually identifiable people.

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The role of the figure with the rifle at the painting’s front right side is obscure. His attire, resembling that of a peasant more than that of a soldier, is different from that of the rest of the firing squad. He is further detached from the firing squad by seemingly looking in the wrong direction, namely, in the direction of the beholder, thus both disconnecting himself from the execution scene and uncomfortably involving the viewer in it, although his eyes, hidden behind the hat-brim, cannot be seen. Next to him is a man with a sword, presumably the sword officer, but his role in the execution is unclear, too. Positioned behind the execution squad, he cannot possibly have given the command for the execution that, as the smoke of the rifles indicates, is in motion, having already affected the figure depicted on the painting’s left side, bent forward (although it is impossible to know whether he is wounded or dead). Thus, there is actually not much that the painting reveals clearly and unmistakably. It would also be naïve to assume that it would actually be possible to grasp that what it does reveal by simply describing it: every description is the construction of something new because verbal and visual narratives give very different accounts of the world (MacDougall 1998). Therefore, as John Elderfield (2006, 69) puts it in the catalog of the 2006 Manet exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,3 for which he served as curator, “we should notice the impossibility of firm identification that this painting asserts,” among other things, because the figures that in later paintings can clearly be identified as Maximilian, Mejía, and Miramón are, in the Boston painting, “nameless as well as faceless.” Furthermore, the painting’s “blurred, irregular patches of spread, thinned, compacted, scratched, and abraded paint are not simply representations of the smoke of the rifles or the fall of morning light upon the execution; neither are they marks of tentativeness and indecision. Rather, they should be thought of as positive statements of uncertainty . . . of someone torn between painting uncertainty and advancing a project of knowledge” (69). Thus, without wanting to suggest that paintings and photographs operate in similar manner, it can be said that every interpretation of this painting has to be aware of what Walter Benjamin has formulated with respect to photography, namely, that without captions, photographs are bound to get stuck in the approximate (1963, 64). It also has to be aware of what Marianne Hirsch has noted, again with respect to photography, that there is a tension “between the little a photograph reveals and all that it promises to reveal but cannot” (1997, 119). However, both the tension referred to by Hirsch and the approximate referred to by Benjamin might be an asset rather than a liability. Rather than diminishing the painting or the photograph to the depiction and, perhaps, critique of a given, singular event, it might help acknowledge

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the painting’s or the photograph’s universal relevance as an indicator of specific features of the human condition similar, arguably, to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Robert Capa’s “Spanish Soldier Drops Dead with a Bullet through His Head, July 12, 1937,” that, rather than just being artistic interventions in the Spanish Civil War, can also be seen as accusations against war in general.4 Aestheticization of Politics—Anaesthetization of Emotions Photography has often been accused of aestheticizing war and anaesthetizing emotions when depicting war. There certainly is a close relationship between photography and the aestheticization of politics: the aestheticization of mass meetings, parades, and movements was considerably facilitated by modern techniques of taking and developing pictures. For example, in World War I, aerial photography aestheticized and transfigured war, violence, and death by taking, from the air, photographs of “impersonal landscapes,” which abstracted from human suffering and focused on “surface patterns composed of dugouts, trenches, supply and communication lines” (Apel 1999, 81). Dehumanizing and aestheticizing war by means of aerial photography was an attempt to legitimize war by abstracting from its cruelty and suffering. It thus ran counter to the traits inherent in early war photography that, to some extent, aimed at verifying the personal experiences of those who had actually been on the battlefield. Such photography was often based on the thought that a realistic depiction of cruelty would in itself help stop the slaughter or prevent future warfare. Depicting details rather than grand scenes and ordinary soldiers rather than generals was one of photography’s contributions to the “democratization of images” (Hüppauf 1993, 133). Traditional battle paintings frequently had the aim of uncritically depicting the war heroes and confirming the way they saw themselves and the battle, whereas photographs addressed a larger audience and a wider range of issues, among which the details of the battle and the “image from below” (134) established a new visual mode of representation. However, only a few of the photographs taken, for example, during the American Civil War that realistically documented human suffering were actually published at that time.5 Those that were published “were embedded in the overall image of a morally justified war” (Hüppauf 1993, 143). Furthermore, most photographs from the American Civil War and also most photographs from the preceding Crimean War were following the code of the picturesque, thus helping both to aestheticize destruction and to transform the war into one characterized “by a striking absence of war” and the

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“destructive violence of the battlefield” (148). The photographs taken during the Crimean War by Roger Fenton are criticized for depicting “soldiers placidly sitting near their tents or allied generals in conference” (Perlmutter 2001, 82) and for not showing the realities of war. Fenton was under strict military supervision and plagued by the cumbersome technology of the day, rendering the taking of photographs of moving objects impossible. He is said to have “enjoyed a good life at the dinner tables of the generals” (82). His photographs were in accordance with the image of the war that the generals wanted to have disseminated. Whatever their merit is, they can hardly be considered a work of critique. In mass meetings and in war, “the mass looks in its own face” (Benjamin 1963, 42). With respect to Manet’s Boston painting, it has been said that the viewers participate in the execution scene through the implicit contact between them and the NCO preparing the coup de grace: the NCO does not seem to observe the execution but rather faces the painting’s viewers. In the Mannheim painting, the viewers’ involvement becomes stronger still, even inevitable, turning the viewer from a detached observer into a participant of the scene. While “the Boston painting set the pattern for the series in placing the viewer before both the NCO and the single soldier . . . in the Mannheim painting Manet seems to be privileging the NCO over the single soldier by placing our shadow in front of him” (Elderfield 2006, 133, emphasis added), thus involving us, the viewers, directly in the execution scene. We are not the only spectators regarding the execution scene. In the Boston and London paintings, the execution takes place in an open landscape. In contrast, in the Mannheim painting—and also in the small Copenhagen painting and the lithograph—Manet used a wall to separate the execution scene from the surrounding landscape, arguably to increase the intensity of the unfolding drama. The conceptions of the wall are different; in the lithograph it is designed in a corrida style with clear references to Goya’s and Manet’s earlier work on bullfights, whereas later it is a plain wall. But in both cases, spectators are peeping over the wall (just as they did in Goya’s A Picador is Unhorsed and Falls under the Bull, 1816 and Manet’s own Bullfight from 1865 to 1866, another example of Manet’s practice of intervisuality). This group of people obviously has come to see the execution. Elderfield writes,“They all look, as well as they can from their elevated, rearward position, at what is happening to the victims. (Their looking directs ours, from the opposite side of the painting, and helps to set up its initial reading)” (2006, 137–38). Although they do not seem to look in the viewers’ direction, they communicate with us and influence our looking. How they respond to “the pain of others” (Sontag 2003) is hard to say; most of them do not reveal their emotions and attitudes, neither sympathy with the victims nor support for the

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firing squad can clearly be discerned. Simply by being there, however, they— like us—become accessories to the execution, accomplices perhaps, not least because, although “having knowledge of suffering points to an obligation to give assistance” (Boltanski 1999, 20), we cannot do anything to prevent it. In addition to the group of people watching the execution scene, there are also two clusters of anonymous people on the hillside that cannot be dissected into the individuals of which the groups, far away from the execution scene, consist. These groups seem to have been Manet’s response to reports in the newspapers of groups of poor Indians gathering on the hillside. They “are not only too distant to see properly; they are also too distant to be heard or to hear” (Elderfield 2006, 138). Their miniaturization corresponds with the overall lack of importance attached to indigenous people in colonial discourse and practice and the colonists’ proclivity to speak and act on their behalf and, ostensibly, in their interest. It might be interpreted as Manet’s critique of this colonial practice, but their depiction as anonymous groups of people corresponds with the colonial practice, still observable today, of reducing individual people to “figures in the crowd” (Gregory 2004, 199). The experience of one’s own moral failure in the sense that one has not been able to prevent an execution or, for that matter, another form of violence is an almost daily experience for people exposed to media coverage of wars, famines, atrocities, and other forms of human suffering. Photography is often blamed for having a “dulling, if not desensitizing” effect (Danto 2006). Susan Sontag has even suggested that “most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest” (2003, 95). However, these generic assessments seem to be inattentive to both the surplus of meaning that photographs always carry with them and the differences among viewers in responding to them. Indeed, many photographs, shown and seen hundreds of times and engraved on each person’s pictorial memory, still move us, touch us, make us cry. Thus, Arthur Danto’s generic critique seems to be unfair: while some photographs do have a dulling effect, others do not.6 Some photographs have a desensitizing effect on some viewers but not on others. Some photographs have a dulling effect because they are shown too often; it is the repetitive display of a given photograph, not the photograph as such that is to be blamed for desensitivization (Möller, 2006). In addition, and often ignored in analyses of photography, photographs not only have a visual dimension but also a material dimension. They not only touch us, but we can touch them with the sensitive tips of our fingers and by so doing relate to them and to that which they depict; a corporeal relationship that can hardly be established with respect to paintings exhibited in museums and digital photography and the display of its products on the computer screen.

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This is arguably one of the reasons for the peculiar reaction to the publication of the now notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, which were visual documents of mistreatment and torture of inmates at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, twenty miles west of Baghdad. Most viewers first saw these photographs on the screens of their computers or television sets. These photographs were taken by the jailors between October and December 2003, emailed to friends, and digitally disseminated almost in real time all over the television, computer, and newspaper legible world. The images were decipherable also by illiterates to whom the written accounts of the scandal may have been incomprehensible. When published in 2004, the photographs were seen in parts of the non-Western world as another piece of evidence of the West’s moral hypocrisy, degeneracy, and inattentiveness to the values of others. They appalled Western observers, although some were shocked not by that what the photographs depicted, but rather by the fact that the photographs, in violation of U.S. law, had been taken and published.7 Since “an existing body of facts is usually compatible with a number of separate stories” (Ringmar 2006, 407), it is not surprising that two master narratives have subsequently been constructed with reference to the images. The official U.S. position, on the one hand, focused on “operators’ errors” and “a few bad apples.” On the other hand, the position held by, for example, Sheik Mohammed Bashir saw the images as “perfect symbols of the subjugation and degradation that the American occupiers have inflicted on Iraq and the rest of the Arab world” (Danner 2004, 28). As always, the images show both and, owing to the surplus of meaning that every image carries with it, more. The Western discourse revolving around the Abu Ghraib photographs was mainly focused on the roots of the scandal that, according to Seymour Hersh (2004b), lie in the expansion of a secret operation in the context of the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. The Western debate also stressed the role of the perpetrators, their superiors, and commanders—the chain of command (see Hersh 2004a)—and investigated the question of individual and collective guilt. It elaborated on the question of whether the treatment of inmates in Abu Ghraib was torture or not (Martin 2006, 516–17) and it discussed the question of whether the Geneva Convention was to have been applied to Abu Ghraib or not. The Western discourse, too, focused on the question of the extent to which these practices were, or seemed to be, covered by law and on the question of whether or not these practices were “systemic. Authorized. Condoned. Covered up” (Sontag 2004). Some authors speculated “that the perpetrators of the abuse had no specific end in mind” except teaching the victims “who [they] are and what

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[their] place is in relation to [the jailors]” (Ghosh 2005). However, other authors argued that, at least in the beginning, the sexual humiliation and posed photographs were sought to motivate the victims on the basis of “fear of exposure . . . to gather information about pending insurgency action” (Hersh 2004b). Others investigated the question of guilt by arguing that, rather than understanding Abu Ghraib as a “public relations disaster,” the “complex crimes of leadership, policies and authority revealed by the pictures” should be dealt with (Sontag 2004). Importantly, the Western discourse was curiously inattentive to the victims. Indeed, the “true focus of our curiosity here is . . . on ourselves” (Simpson 2006, 107). Comparing the Abu Ghraib photographs with lynching photographs from the early twentieth century, Dora Apel (2005, 89) argues, “More shocking, even, in both sets of images [than the unabashed picturing of torture and humiliation itself ] are the proud perpetrators whose smug gloating we do not expect to see and who flaunt an appalling shamelessness.” Such official investigations as the Taguba Report meticulously listed all forms of crimes and abuse of detainees by military police personnel but did not have much to say on the victims. However, the detainees on whose statements the Taguba report was in part based were not reduced to numbers but acknowledged by their names.8 In contrast, press reports and politicians’ statements occasionally conveyed the impression that “we” are the “real” victims; that the photographs threaten “our” fight against “terrorism” or at least its legitimacy, that they undermine “our” values and give the wrong impression of what “our” societies are actually about, and so on. Thus, it was an essentially self-centered debate with some observers representing the photographs as being detrimental and damaging mainly to “us.” In some cases, this discourse also repeated the perpetrators’ strategy of reducing the victims to “non-persons, bare, faceless, nameless” (Vogl 2004)—occasionally reduced to numbers—whose verbal testimony of abuse and torture was considered as less valuable than the photographic documents provided by the perpetrators. The understanding of the photographs as evidence and the preceding ignorance of the victims’ verbal statements9 deprive the victims, in what has been called “the era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006), of the capacity of giving testimony and getting heard. They monopolize the act of witnessing: the photographs erase the victims’ testimony for a second time (Vogl 2004) thus entmündigen the witnesses.10 As Danto (2006) has put it, “When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims.”

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Furthermore, the viewers who decide to take a look at the photographs— thus not opting for not looking—have already “take[n] up a position” (Boltanski 1999, 20) and this position has moral consequences. The media researcher Joseph Vogl (2004) argues that the act of viewing indeed contaminates the viewers. The perpetrators, by posing in front of the camera, call upon the viewers to look (“Look!”) and the viewers, by following the perpetrators’ call, become involved in the perpetrators’ act. Comparable to what has been said earlier in connection with Manet’s London painting, a similar line can be argued with respect to the Abu Ghraib photographs that simply by watching, we become accessories to the humiliation of others; we are no longer innocent viewers but rather observing participants. Likewise, the art historian Horst Bredekamp (2004) argues that there is an intimate relationship between viewing and participating. To deliberately watch an image of a crime is, according to Bredekamp, an act of complicity if the crime had been committed in the first place, in order to produce images of it. Thus, if a human being is killed so as to transfer his or her death into an image, then regarding this image inevitably is an act of participation in the crime. If victims are humiliated and abused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images, then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of the perpetrators. Art after Abu Ghraib How to respond to this dilemma? Not watching is not really an option, not only because we are living in a culture that is dominated by images, but also because closing one’s eyes to the pain of others, although foiling the perpetrators’ intentions, would not seem to be morally acceptable behavior. Roland Bleiker has suggested that artistic engagements “have a potential to capture and communicate a range of crucial but often neglected emotional issues” (2006, 78). Let us, therefore, return from the Abu Ghraib photographs to art—without ignoring that many photographs, too, have a potential to communicate emotions.11 Approximately at the same time when Manet and the Execution of Maximilian was on show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Marlborough Gallery ran an exhibition of paintings by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib.12 Regarding the Manet exhibition, parallels have been established both by John Elderfield and in the press between Manet’s execution scene and the ongoing war in Iraq. Elderfield states that it is not accidental that “an exhibition and publication appearing in 2006 are devoted to works that depict the baleful consequences of a military intervention and regime change” (2006, 23). Holland

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Cotter, writing on the Manet exhibition in the New York Times on November 3, 2006, writes, “What happens when a powerful country with imperial ambitions forces its way at gunpoint into the affairs of another, distant country, of which it has no cultural knowledge, on the pretext of bringing enlightened governance? And that country meets the encroachment with violent resistance? You get disaster.” It is also—and despite all differences—quite obvious to compare the paintings of the execution of emperor Maximilian with the December 30, 2006, execution of Saddam Hussein, video-phoned footage of which could be seen on television and on the Internet. With respect to Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, the parallels are even more obvious. The paintings have clearly been inspired by what happened in Abu Ghraib. These events helped turn an artist into an eminent political voice, who was hitherto best known not for his political statements but “for his highly mannered, widely popular paintings and sculptures of corpulent figures: nudes, personages from famous paintings of the past, and men and women from all walks of Latin American society” (Heartney 2007, 128).13 Botero, having resided in the United States from 1960 to 1973 and being familiar with and appreciative of that country’s culture, politics, and society, is also quoted as saying that the Abu Ghraib works represent for him “both a broad statement about cruelty and at the same time an accusation of U.S. policies” (Ebony 2006, 12). By rejecting to sell his paintings, Botero both refuses to make money out of the victims and implicitly criticizes the American way of life and its tendency to turn almost everything into a commodity. There are also parallels between Botero’s work and Manet’s in the sense that both Manet and Botero imagined, as Elderfield puts it with respect to Manet, “an unseen event, known only through written text” (2006, 51). Indeed, according to Juan Forero, writing in the New York Times on May 8, 2005, Botero’s paintings are mostly based on news reports and other published descriptions, for example Hersh’s reports in the New Yorker, and not primarily on the photographs—although Botero, as an “admitted news addict,” is also said to have done further research on the television and the Internet (Ebony 2006, 13). His reliance on written accounts seems to be one of the reasons for one of their most striking features, namely and in contrast to the photographs, the absence of the perpetrators from most of the paintings and the strong focus on the victims—a feature that the paintings share, curiously enough, with the documentary practice of British colonial rule in late nineteenth century India, taking photographs of prisoners in a way very similar to the Abu Ghraib photographs but excluding the jailors from representation (Ghosh 2005). As to Botero’s paintings, Eleanor Heartney writes,

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“With a few exceptions, the prison guards are offstage or represented only by a boot or a hand emerging from beyond the canvas edge. Instead, the focus is on the prisoners themselves, as they suffer their torments with grimaces that are often largely obscured by hoods or blindfolds. In the absence of fully visible faces, these naked and near naked bodies become the vehicles of emotional expression” (2007, 130). Just as Manet was rather liberal in incorporating only selected aspects of the available information on Maximilian’s execution into his paintings, Botero counter-factually adheres to his trademark—figures “exaggerated principally in terms of their volumetric relationships to their surroundings”—so as to assign to the prison inmates “a psychological and moral weightiness that commands, if it does not overwhelm, their confined spaces” (Ebony 2006, 10). Although Hersh, in the New Yorker, wrote about “grinning” and “smiling” soldiers, giving “thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis” (2004a), the jailors in Botero’s paintings are neither smiling nor grinning. Rather, in the few paintings where their faces can fully be seen (Abu Ghraib 13, Abu Ghraib 17, Abu Ghraib 19, Abu Ghraib 43, and Abu Ghraib 77), they are embodiments of grim and brutal determination. In other paintings, their faces are off the canvas (Abu Ghraib 4, Abu Ghraib 10, and Abu Ghraib 16), their heads are painted from behind (Abu Ghraib 9) or hidden behind arms raised in order to beat a prisoner (Abu Ghraib 2). In contrast to Botero’s paintings on the war in Colombia bearing such titles as Massacre in the Cathedral and Massacre in Colombia, his Abu Ghraib paintings are simply numbered from Abu Ghraib 1 to Abu Ghraib 86. Thus, although his representational strategy of showing, in some of his paintings, only a boot or a hand of the perpetrators reminds the viewer of Goya’s Plate 15 from Los Desastres de la Guerra (Y no hai remedio [And there’s nothing to be done]), implying the presence of soldiers only by the top of their bayoneted rifles, Botero deviates from Goya by not adding textual explanations to what is to be seen in the paintings. Thus, Goya, on the one hand, seems to have believed that in order to lend authenticity to the etchings’ “ghoulish cruelties” (Sontag 2003, 44), verbal explanations were needed, “offering assurances of the image’s veracity” (46).14 Botero, on the other hand, relies on the power of the painting. In fact, no one—not even the fiercest apologists of the U.S. occupation of Iraq—seems to have called into question the authenticity of both the Abu Ghraib photographs and Botero’s paintings. What Botero’s works make us realize, then, is that “we knew that Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours.” The paintings, thus, “establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims” (Danto 2006)—a sense of identification that neither the photographs

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nor the debate on the photographs succeeded in establishing. Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times on November 15, 2006, even argues that the paintings “restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation.” Nowhere is this more obvious than in Abu Ghraib 80 and Abu Ghraib 81, concentrating on a victim’s hand and depicting torture mainly by implication. The lack of color gives the scene a sense of urgency. For the viewer, it is not possible to avoid the victims’ pain by focusing attention on the jailors; we are compelled to face the victims and their pain. We are compelled, too, to speak up because “by speaking up . . . the spectator can maintain his integrity when, brought face to face with suffering, he is called upon to act in a situation in which direct action is difficult or impossible” (Boltanski 1999, 20). Since speech-acts are not medium-specific—they can consist of verbal, written, and visual signs (Mitchell 1994, 160)—this is exactly what Botero does. The same can be said with respect to the work of such Iraqi artists as Abdul Karim Khalil who, like some of his colleagues, used the Abu Ghraib photographs as a point of departure for his own artistic engagement with the social realities of occupied Iraq (Abdul-Ahad 2004; Blanford 2004). In his series of marble and bronze figurines, titled A Man from Abu Ghraib, Abdul Karim Khalil not only deconstructs the original photographs but, by using “white marble associated with classical Greek sculpture” (Apel 2005, 99) also critically engages with Western feelings and fantasies of cultural superiority.15 References Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith. 2004. Art under fire. Guardian, November 22, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5068309–110428,00.html (accessed November 22, 2004). Apel, Dora. 2005. Torture culture: Lynching photographs and the images of Abu Ghraib. Art Journal 64 (2): 88–100. ———. 1999. Cultural battlegrounds: Weimar photographic narratives of war. New German Critique 76: 49–84. Arendt, Paul. 2006. World Trade Centre memorial site opens with photos of 9/11 attacks. Guardian, August 29, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329563426 –110427,00.html (accessed August 29, 2006). Benjamin, Walter. 1963. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp. Blanford, Nicholas. 2004. Iraqi artists depict anger over Abu Ghraib. Christian Science Monitor, June 15, http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p07s01–woiq .html (accessed June 3, 2006). Bleiker, Roland. 2006. Art after 9/11. Alternatives 31: 77–99.

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Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Botero, Fernando. 2006. Botero Abu Ghraib. Munich, Germany: Prestel. Bredekamp, Horst. 2004. Wir sind befremdete Komplizen. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 28. Couldry, Nick. 2000. Inside culture: Re-imagining the method of cultural studies. London: Sage. Danner, Mark. 2004. Torture and truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the war on terror. New York: New York Review of Books. Danto, Arthur C. 2006. The body in pain. Nation, November 27, http://www .thenation.com/doc/20061127/danto (accessed November 13, 2006). Ebony, David. 2006. Botero Abu Ghraib. In Botero Abu Ghraib by Fernando Botero, 5–19. Munich, Germany: Prestel. Elderfield, John. 2006. Manet and the execution of Maximilian. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Geyer, Michael. 1997. The place of the Second World War in German memory and history. New German Critique 71: 5–40. Ghosh, Amitav. 2005. The theater of cruelty. Nation, July 18, http://www.thenation .com/doc.mhtml?i=20050718&s=ghosh (accessed July 4, 2005). Gregory, Derek. 2004. The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Heartney, Eleanor. 2007. An iconography of torture. Art in America, January, 128–31. Hersh, Seymour M. 2004a. Torture at Abu Ghraib. New Yorker, April 30, http:// www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040510fa_fact (accessed May 5, 2004). ———. 2004b. The gray zone. New Yorker, May 15, http://www.newyorker .com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact (accessed May 17, 2004). Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family frames: Photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Hüppauf, Bernd. 1993. The emergence of modern war imagery in early photography. History and Memory 5: 131–50. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martin, Gus. 2006. Understanding terrorism: Challenges, perspectives, and issues. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representations. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Möller, Frank. 2006. Von Mäusen und Kapuzenmännern: Banaler Militarismus, visuelle Repräsentation und kollektive Erinnerung. In Banal Militarism. Zur Veralltäglichung des Militärischen im Zivilen, ed. Tanja Thomas and Fabian Virchow, 49–63. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript. Perlmutter, David D. 2001. Visions of war: Picturing warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Ringmar, Erik. 2006. Inter-textual relations: The quarrel over the Iraq War as a conflict between narrative types. Cooperation and Conflict 41: 403–21.

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Rubinstein, Raphael. 2007. The death of an emperor. Art in America, January: 101–5, 157. Simpson, David, 2006. 9/11: The culture of commemoration. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ———. 2004. What have we done? Guardian, May 24, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ print/0,3858,4930921–110878,00.html (accessed May 25, 2004). Vogl, Joseph. 2004. Folter im Bild. Die Zeit, http://www.zeit.de (accessed May 13, 2004). Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The era of the witness. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Notes 1. Many thanks to Eeva Puumala for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 2. In addition, Manet produced a lithograph of the scene, currently owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a small oil painting that can be seen at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. 3. Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 5, 2006–January 29, 2007. 4. The same can be said with respect to Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra and Jacques Callot’s Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre. 5. Likewise, Goya’s cycle Los Desastres de la Guerra was published only posthumously and Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian was for the first time publicly shown in Europe in 1905 (the Boston and the Mannheim paintings; the fragments of the London painting were reassembled by Edgar Degas in the 1890s but recombined on one canvas by the National Gallery, London, not before 1992). The Mannheim painting was privately shown in London in 1898, however. The lithograph, when presented for official registration, was prohibited (Elderfield 2006, 17–18, 116–17). 6. Thus, Sontag (2003, 105) now asks, “As much as [photographs] create sympathy, I wrote [in On Photography (1977)] photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?” The same question can be asked with respect to her claim, cited earlier, that depictions of tormented bodies arouse a prurient interest. 7. “As a result of the Abu Ghraib debacle, most U.S. soldiers in Iraq are prohibited from taking photographs and videos while on duty” (Ebony 2006, 8). 8. The “Article 15–6 Investigation of the 8ooth Military Police Brigade (the Taguba Report)” is reprinted in Danner (2004, 279–328). 9. For sworn statements by Abu Ghraib detainees, see Danner (2004, 225–48).

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10. The English equivalent to the German word entmündigen is “to legally incapacitate.” The German word is derived from the word Mund (mouth), so that entmündigen also refers to situations in which someone is not permitted to speak or act for him or herself. Rather, others are speaking and acting in his or her stead. This obviously has always been an important ingredient of the colonial discourse and practice, turning subjects into objects, and it, too, “is, fundamentally, a political question about who gets heard” (Couldry 2000, 57). Thus the claim, made in cultural and postcolonial studies, that voice be given to marginalized and silenced people(s) is insufficient as long as others, in particular “we,” are not willing to listen. 11. For example, commenting on the photographic exhibition Here: Remembering 9/11, the first exhibition to go on show at the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City, Alice Greenwald, the memorial’s director, is quoted as saying, “There’s literally nothing to see but a gaping hole in the ground . . . And yet people come, as if they’re on pilgrimage. It’s as if they’re looking through these images to the site. It’s deeply emotional” (Arendt 2006). 12. Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, Marlborough Gallery, New York, October 18, 2006–November 21, 2006 (see also Botero 2006). 13. Prior to the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings, Botero had already attracted attention as a political artist when, in the late 1990s, he started to create works depicting the drug-related war in Colombia in shocking detail. Furthermore his portraits of figures of authority are said to have “routinely satirized” these figures’ “trumped-up grandeur” and “air of self-importance” (Ebony 2006, 11). 14. See, for example, I Saw This (Yo Lo Vi) and And This, Too (Y Esty Tambien). 15. See http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/mumford/mumford10–5–17 .asp (accessed February 19, 2007).

CHAPTER 2

Art in the Age of Terror The Israeli Case Dana Arieli-Horowitz

Introduction

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rt produced in relation or as a reaction to terror is the focal point of the present discussion. This chapter centers on art in the age of terror. Moreover, I will focus on art created during the years 2000 to 2004, throughout the Al Aqsa Intifada or the Second Intifada to which both the Jewish and Palestinian societies were exposed.1 It appears that the Israeli artistic community unconsciously and unintentionally produced a flood of creative work with terror at its core. Most of the artists I interviewed2 reacted to acts of terror by depicting both Israeli and Palestinian life under the shadow of terrorism. Reactions of the artist community to terror are fragmented, heterogeneous, and intense. This chapter wishes to offer a preliminary typology that may facilitate different readings of Israeli art dealing with terror. As we shall see, it is possible to differentiate between various types of reactions, but on the whole, artistic reactions may fit a spectrum that has direct media art on one end and abstract political art on the other. The following pages discuss both types in depth. There are many precedents of art reacting to terror,3 and I certainly do not claim that politics and terror force their way into art in Israel alone. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of the Israeli case is derived from its intensity, its all-encompassing extent, and the variety of styles that artists resort to when dealing with terror. I believe that this intensity of creation fits the term cultural trauma.4 It appears that not all national traumas produce cultural ones,

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and that only in rare cases does the intensity of reaction in the artistic sphere justify the term. Following Jeffrey C. Alexander, I use the term cultural trauma, which seems appropriate only when the vast majority of artists within a community react to a specific event. Aesthetics and Terror: Abstract Political Art In a recent conversation with Micha Ullman (b. 1939), a leading Israeli artist, he claimed that the interest artists show in terror may be the result of a similarity in world views; radicalism, anarchism, and the fracturing of conventions are just some of the affinities between artists and terrorists. Ullman’s statement does not seem controversial given art movements such as Futurism, whose members supported the idea that violence and terror are legitimate tools which must be used if artists are to gain influence. At the end of the nineteenth century, thinkers and philosophers such as Bakunin and Le Bon were praising terrorism, claiming that violence had an intrinsic moral value and was a necessary implement in purifying the world of degeneration. After September 11, the notion that acts of terror have aesthetic value became popular. Thinkers such as Z˘i˘zek in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Paul Virilio in his Art and Fear referred to the images of the collapsing Twin Towers, trying to explain the fascination they created and claiming that terror was aesthetic (see Virilio 2004; Z˘i˘zek 2002). These images associated with terror became powerful tools in the postmodern bank of images. Not surprisingly, artists such as Damien Hirst in England or composers like Stockhausen were quick to assert that September 11 was one of the most aesthetic visions they had ever experienced.5 Dealing with terror in art poses a great dilemma; on the one hand, there is the threat that in choosing terror as its topic, art may be reduced to a political banner. On the other hand, and especially in recent years, art with no reference to context may easily become irrelevant. I believe the solution chosen by some of the artists is brilliant; they have taken themes or images from sites where suicide bombings took place. The themes may be obvious, but taken out of their immediate context—and treated in an abstract manner through the process of creation—they receive new meanings. The result is thus not too obvious. This is why I chose the term abstract political art, which I believe is suitable for describing this kind of work, as it so perfectly mixes aesthetics and politics; the themes are certainly political, taken from a concrete context, yet there is an effort to leave them as abstract and as universal as possible. Such images do not clearly indicate the exact location or time of occurrence

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so that, although the viewer may recognize a concrete political context, there is always another layer of meaning. Abstract political art reacting to terror may be classified into various types according to the themes and iconography chosen by the artist. Some artists deal with suicide bombing sites; others try to depict “the other.” In so doing, these artists may be criticizing the political reality that has driven the terrorists to an act of suicide. In other cases, artists attempt to digest the traumatic events of our times through the very process of creation. The constant return to sites of terror in Israeli art might hint at a posttraumatic reaction. In the following pages, I will present some examples of each of the categories I have mentioned, unfortunately only a fraction of what actually exists. As will be shown, in some cases, artistic creations may suit more than one category or type of reaction. To my understanding, the greater the variety of layers of interpretation the better the work is. Depending on the “strategy” chosen by the artist, the result becomes a very sophisticated and unique form of creation used to depict terror. The uniqueness is derived from a balanced look at a complex political reality, one that reflects a world view that is sometimes escapist, ironic, or both. Abstract Political Art: Suicide Bombing Sites Guy Raz’s (b. 1964) photos are an example of abstract political art reacting to terror.6 In his project, Two Seconds, he indirectly relates to suicide bombing sites. Raz appears to be fascinated with time; two seconds is what it takes for the suicide bomber to trigger his or her explosive belt. Two seconds is also the time that Raz keeps the aperture of his lens open.7 Raz chooses sites in Israel where acts of terror have taken place, but the frame does not necessarily include any concrete reference or sign. If the viewer wishes, he or she may ignore the time and the place, as these are left unclear. Only those familiar with the Israeli vocabulary of terror images might recognize these sites. For others, the outspread buses might look like a futuristic experiment in motion, a phantom bus galloping through city streets, hurrying over memory’s suppressed landscapes, fear of death evaporated. Ironically, though his photos represent terror, the way his buses are literally spread all over the image turns the result into something surrealistically beautiful. It is an image that maintains its aesthetics despite depicting an act of sheer horror. Raz is no doubt trying to deal with the notion of terror as aesthetics; probably the same aesthetics that Hirst had in mind. But his images do not turn into a political poster; instead he succeeds in creating art that is both political and universal.

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Carmit Gil’s bus presents another layer of abstract political art. Gil (b. 1976) participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale, where her work was exhibited in the central pavilion. In 2002, when she completed her bus, no one in Israel could have seriously taken it for a vehicle of public transportation. Nevertheless, her interpretation differs sharply from that of Raz. The red and fragmented remains of the bus are not taken out of any context, and may be located anywhere. The viewer has no immediate clue as to where, if at all, this disaster took place. The Israeli viewer, used to seeing remains along the road, associates it with the vehicle skeletons of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War lying along the road that leads to Jerusalem, but to other viewers no hint is given. The artist almost urges the viewer to climb up the stairs and look at what remains of the bus. These remains, like human remains, are cleaned up immediately after “the event,” urging people to get back to daily routine. Gil may be referring here to the activities of the Zaka8 organization, which has appointed itself to the work of cleansing the “scene” and obsessively collecting all human remains for burial. Beyond reading Gil’s bus as a reaction to terror within an immediate context, it is possible to look at it as a creation dealing with open space. When asked about her intentions, the artist referred to Georges Perec’s writings and particularly to his Espèces d’espaces (see Perec 1974). It is exactly the ability to read this work on so many levels that reflects my argument regarding abstract political art. Abstract Political Art: The Other A society’s bank of images is a very powerful reservoir in the process of shaping a collective memory. In her article, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” Sontag claimed that “for a long time—at least six decades—photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events.” She then maintains that the defining association of people everywhere with the Second Gulf War will be connected to photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners or the capture of Saddam Hussein (see Sontag 2004). I believe she is right and that these images are now part of our (Western) memory museum. Reality in the occupied territories is at the center of activity for Miki Kratsman (b. 1959), a committed press photographer. Toward the end of the 1980s, David Reeb (b. 1952), a leading political artist active in Israel, became aware of Kratsman’s photojournalism. His photos became a part of the bank of images Reeb uses in his paintings. The mutual and fascinating collaboration between Reeb and Kratsman serves as an example of the process through

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which photographs shape our collective memory. Reeb and Kratsman’s collaboration is based on an affinity of world views. It is, for example, apparent in Kratsman’s “Om el Phaem,” “translated” by Reeb as “Where are the Soldiers?” (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).9 Kratsman’s image depicts everyday reality in the occupied territories where men are stripped of their clothing so that they can be searched for explosives.

Figure 2.1 Miki Kratsman, “Om el Phaem,” 2002.

Figure 2.2 David Reeb, Where are the Soldiers? 2003.

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The viewer is confronted with a colorful image of a group of teenagers, all standing with their shirts and hands in the air and waiting for the soldiers to come and carry out their meticulous body search. This bizarre “freeze” is “translated” by Reeb, enhancing its absurdity through the use of color. This process of “translation” the artist is involved in may explain why this work would not fit the category of direct media art that will be discussed later. Although Reeb is reworking an image taken from the media, his reaction is characterized by a unique process of creation. It is as if the color stains become abstract and reality on the West Bank is transformed into a harmony of colors, thereby taking the viewer far and away from its origins. The title “Where are the Soldiers?” is used by Reeb to stress the context so that a viewer might not think that the young boys are dancing or fooling around. Apart from the topic, this work is yet another example of the sophisticated interrelations between media and art. Sharif Waked’s (b. 1964) “Chic Point” serves as another example of abstract political art looking at “the other.” This seven-minute video-art clip released in 2003 deals with the huge gap between wealthy Tel Aviv, in which fashion shows are staged on a permanent basis, and the everyday reality of Palestinians at the roadblocks. Although roadblocks have been treated before by many Jewish artists as a symbol of the occupation,10 Waked’s decision to stage a fashion show in the miserable reality of the occupied territories is extremely ironic. His models at the “Chic Point” wear clothes appropriate for body searches at the roadblocks. Reflections of Posttrauma Not only does the intensity of the art justify the term cultural trauma, it appears that the methods, techniques, and materials sometimes chosen by the artists hint at a posttraumatic reaction and even at a posttrauma therapeutic treatment. Some artists feel a need to go back to all the places where acts of terror have occurred; others try to digest horrifying images taken at the scene either by looking at them again and again or by trying to overlook the horror and paint them in “other” colors. A fascinating example of a process of creation that seems to have had therapeutic value comes from the studio of Gal Weinstein (b. 1970). Weinstein took the images of Saddam Hussein’s sons Qusay and Uday. When I asked Weinstein how he acquired the images, he replied that they were the images of Saddam Hussein’s two dead sons, probably released by the American media as part of its war propaganda. The materials he chose to work with hint, perhaps unconsciously, at creation as therapy (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4).

Figure 2.3 Gal Weinstein, Uday, 2004.

Figure 2.4 Gal Weinstein, Qusay, 2004.

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When the viewer looks at these 40 inches x 28 inches/100 x 70 centimeters images, he or she immediately feels that something is wrong; the images are horrifying, but they do not look like photojournalism. Instead there is a sense of blurring or disdain that hints at the method the painter was using. Weinstein does not “just” paint them; instead he uses felt—hardly a common material in fine arts and certainly not today. If felt ever comes to mind in a creative context, that context is crafts or recreational hours in a nursing home. We connect felt with therapy. This process of translation may again explain why this work does not fit the direct media art category. The term therapy is suitable in Weinstein’s case because a lot of work was needed in order to achieve his results. The effect of the felt becomes even more chilling given the long hours Weinstein had to spend with the images of the dismembered, crushed, distorted figures of Hussein’s two dead sons. Yet the artist does not turn away from horror—he faces it, acknowledges it, crossing looks with the disaster and holding on. The process Merav Sodaey (b. 1970) is experiencing while working on her terror art is yet another attempt at art-as-therapy, resembling Weinstein’s creation in terms of the method and technique used by the artist. As we have seen before in Raz’s and Gil’s works, Sodaey takes images of buses after they have been blown up and translates them into her own private, imaginary, scary fairyland. Her Bus Line 32a is based on a press photograph of the 32a route bus after it was blown up in Jerusalem, in June 2002. This overly familiar news-image of the smoking skeleton of what once was a bus, with its massacred passengers laid out in rows and packaged in black plastic bags, turns into a glittering, shimmering, and seductive scene. “There is a chilling contrast between content and the form, between the subject matter and the decorative aesthetics of the work, which makes it almost unbearable,” says curator Tami Katz Freiman.11 Like the Zaka organization discussed before, Sodaey adds detail upon detail and translates horror into kitsch. At first glance, it looks like a beautiful pointillistic work, and indeed there are visible traces of pointillistic technique when she uses felt-tip pens on silk paper. To my mind, Sodaey’s techniques give the impression that she is not only hoping to heal herself through art, but that she also, like Weinstein, is dealing with the trauma hands-on. In addition to buses, Sodaey has tackled the theme of the female suicide bomber. Female suicide bombers are a unique political and sociological phenomenon that became common during the second Intifada. Palestinian terrorist organizations invest great resources in recruiting young men and women for their jihad. They try to persuade the men that if they were to sacrifice their lives for the liberation of their land from the Zionist conqueror

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they would gain seventy-two pure virgins in heaven. Female suicide bombers are enticed by the promise of a wedding to be celebrated in heaven with their betrothed—the male suicide bombers. Thus Sodaey stresses the irony in the title of another work of art—Female Suicide Bombers for Male Suicide Bombers. This time, she uses images from the media that she works into a beautiful, if chilling, alienation. Her use of acrylic on canvas aims at imitating Gobelin needlework. Even though the image is one of a body hacked to pieces, the needlework processing makes it seem detached and far away. In many cases, Israeli art dealing with terror hints at posttrauma. In “Aftermath,” Yoav Horesh (b. 1975) revisited, over a period of several years, all the sites where suicide bombings had occurred. Going back to places where everything happened appears to me to be another type of posttrauma reflected through art. The images hardly provide any testimony to the horror that happened there. Horesh uses clean black-and-white images that have nothing to do with the overwhelming, messy, and red reality characteristic of such scenes. I believe that the power these images exude comes directly from the artist’s choice of black and white, which rather hints at the horror of terror while at the same time contradicting the overextensive use of color images in Israeli media during the age of terror. The choice of black and white instead of “true” colors may also be connected with the obsessive tendency of Israelis to clean up the terror site and resume normalcy immediately. This need to immediately cleanse the scene is part of a larger phenomenon that has assumed tyrannical dimensions in Israel—the need to completely wipe out tragedy.12 This frenetic drive to conceal pain and suffering certainly does not help in recovering from trauma. This tendency to wipe out reality reminds me of the way Jewish Holocaust survivors were received in Israel; they too were obliged to sweep away their past and forget everything they had left behind. As the next paragraph will show, interrelations between terror and the Holocaust are prevalent in Israeli art. Reflections on Hypertrauma: Terror and the Holocaust There is yet another form of abstract political art, one that, though based on images and themes associated with terror, appears to serve as a late reaction to the Holocaust. The analogy between the situation in the occupied territories and the actions of the Nazis is not, as one might wrongly assume, the result of hostility on the part of the European media during the time of the second Intifada. It first appeared in Israeli art long before the year 2000 and has many facets.

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This analogy is a reflection of the artist’s worldview. In some cases, it is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that are compared to the Nazis; in others it may be argued that the Palestinians are those described as the “New” Nazis. Avner Bar Hama’s “Remember! From Generation to Generation” (2005) introduces a reference to one of the most quoted images associated with the repertoire of the Holocaust. As opposed to the historical image depicting an innocent child with his hands raised to the sky, the contemporary image introduces a young child whose hands are covered with blood. As far as Bar Hama (b. 1946) is concerned, a big question mark hangs over the heads of children in Palestine. The images of Reeb and Kratsman, discussed earlier, contain a similar reference to the image of the Jewish child of the Holocaust. However, the decision to frame Palestinian children during a search, and the fact that nothing is found there, forges an immediate connection between IDF soldiers and the Nazis. For Reeb and Kratsman, both left-wingers, such a comparison makes sense. It reflects a tendency, long apparent in Israeli art, to deal with the oncevictims as gradually becoming oppressors. A conflicting self-image of this sort appears also in David Wackstein’s (b. 1954) works regarding terror. Wackstein uses images taken from the media, but makes an effort to disguise their origins or else uses the media in a more sophisticated manner: his works are based on caricatures that have recently appeared in Arab newspapers. He mainly chooses caricatures that depict Israelis as oppressors; in most cases they are shown as Nazis, for instance, “Swastika,” Figure 2.5, from 2001. This mosaic depicts the former Israeli prime minister, Yitzchak Shamir, as a walking swastika—his fists raised, ready for battle. Yet instead of admitting his power, the prime minister manipulatively wears the yellow stripe as a symbol of Jewish history, as if pleading, “I am miserable.” The fact that Wackstein, an Israeli artist, chooses an anti-Semitic caricature from the current Arab media as a way of dealing with terror is fascinating; it serves as yet another example of art viewing the once-abused Jews as having, in turn, become oppressors. The technique used by Wackstein—assembling a mosaic—could fit his image into our previous discussion on the therapeutic value of art. The mosaic technique, related to ancient Jewish history, introduces a reference to the chosen people, thus rendering the self-irony embedded in this creation even stronger. The same is true of Wackstein’s “Settlers.” Both the IDF soldiers and the woman settler resemble Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, which gained a reputation as Nazi Germany’s most violent anti-Semitic journal. Choosing that specific imagery is certainly no mistake; the comparison between Israelis and

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Figure 2.5 David Wackstein, Swastika, 2001.

Nazis is clear to anyone looking at these images. The fact that an Israeli artist has chosen such images as a point of reference is both perplexing and fascinating. Does he identify with the criticism, believing, as a left-winger, that Israeli society deserves to be depicted in this manner, or does he sustain the opposite opinion in its extreme, namely that producing and publishing such images means sharing the Nazis’ anti-Semitic world-views? Whatever the answer, we are looking at a sophisticated work of art that includes various layers of interpretation. In “Man/Dog Teams,” Weinstein places straight steel wool on a wall. Wolf dogs are being led by figures that resemble policemen or soldiers. The dogs may be searching for explosives in what seems to be an ordinary setting known to every Israeli. Yet there is another layer that leads beyond the immediate. Choosing this imagery may trigger an association that is deeply rooted in Israeli collective memory. The Nazis used wolf dogs to cause fear on various occasions. Using a repertoire of images based on the Holocaust as part of the vocabulary of contemporary everyday life in early twenty-first century Israel can hardly pass as accidental. I believe it calls attention to the continuous stress experienced by citizens whose sense of security and concepts of home versus the front are completely shattered. This might very well be an encounter between successive cultural traumas.

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Aesthetics and Terror: Direct Media Art The term direct media art refers to common phenomena in Israeli art, where artists “quote” or “plant” media images in their art with hardly any interpretation, manipulation, or interference. I call these nonmanipulative creations direct media art because the viewer is confronted with an image that is almost a twin of the original; there is hardly any adaptation or processing in terms of technique or themes. The images chosen by the artists are in some cases provocative and horrifying; it is as if the artist decided to waive his autonomy and chose instead to remain “loyal” to “reality.” Before trying to explain this fascinating phenomenon, I would like to demonstrate what I mean by direct media art. In 2004, Dganit Berest (b. 1949) worked on “The Wall,” which included, among other elements, an image of a suicide bomber looking us directly in the eye. This was not the first time Berest has dealt with terrorists. Her 1998 “TWA” or 1992 “untitled” did exactly that. However neither include the direct image of the terrorist; instead, the viewer was confronted with a person wearing a hood reminiscent of Ku-Klux-Klan attire. The straightforward image she chose now appeared in the press and looked as if taken during the interrogation of the bomber or while in the hands of the security services. It reminds us of “wanted” ads depicting criminals’ images from the beginning of the twentieth century. The image in question is the one of Ramez Obeyed, the suicide bomber (and art student) who blew himself up right in the middle of Tel Aviv, at the entrance to the Dizengoff shopping mall, killing thirteen people on the eve of Purim, March 4, 1996; see Figure 2.6. Such a simple and blunt image of a terrorist raises many questions, but primarily it reminds us that there is no monster behind the “dry” terminology the Israeli media uses. One wonders, “He is so young,” or “He probably has no money.” The encounter with the suicide bomber is not shocking. The viewer is looking at the face of a human being; sometimes one might even detect a certain sense of empathy.13 In focusing on the biological fact—in this particular case—that we are looking at a terrorist, who is also an art student, only emphasizes Berest’s point more profoundly. A different feeling emanates from the images of David Tartakover (b. 1944). Tartakover, a graphic designer and a politically engaged artist, knows how to shock. The images he uses are taken directly from the media with the photographers’ approval and with hardly any interference, yet we do not have the faces of the suicide bombers, but rather the results of their acts; art becomes an implement of the sensational and the shocking. The series “I’m Here” is based on press photographs depicting acts of terror. Every image Tartakover uses was taken at the scene in the aftermath of a

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Figure 2.6 Dganit Berest, The Wall, 2004 (detail).

suicide bombing. At first sight, it appears that he does not change the original image; a closer look though reveals a green banner announcing “I’m Here,” which is the artist’s addition, plus the place and date of the attack. In this case, Ziv Koren took the original image, yet Tartakover always adds an image of himself to the original, wearing a yellow vest as though he took part in the rescue. He puts on a vest that has the word “artist” printed on it, instead of “doctor,” “paramedic,” or “police” (see Figure 2.7). Tartakover uses press images with very strong colors, so much so that the play of a green banner might constitute all one sees, at first sight, in the style of a Benetton ad, perhaps echoing the colors of the Palestinian flag.14 However, once the topic becomes clear, the effect is chilling. “I’m Here” stresses the fact that terror is everywhere; it might strike you in your favorite café. In Tartakover’s case, though, choosing to be there, especially given the artist’s radical left-wing political views, cannot be seen as a mobilization or the desire to express empathy. There must be more to it than that. In my opinion, Tartakover reacts here to the radical change we are all facing in the new era of terror, where breaking news will arrive and images will engulf us instantly and totally. Privacy-invading news generates the sensation of having actually been there. There is certainly a very big question as to how artists can

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Figure 2.7 David Tartakover, I’m Here, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1994, 2003–2004. (Based on a photograph by Ziv Koren.)

respond to this phenomenon, as well as whether they can beat the media. Tartakover responds by choosing to blur, narrow, and almost eliminate the gap between art and media. He seems to be telling the viewer that in order to stay relevant, one must react immediately, perhaps suggesting that the artist is incapable of producing images as powerful as the ones that appear in the media. Michal Heiman (b. 1954) says that she has been collecting blood stains, that is, images of blood from the media for many years, yet during the year 2002, she felt the need to take them out of their immediate media context and presented her series of numbered blood tests. She took the stains out of the draws and, as if they were ready-mades, doubled each of them. Thus, in stressing the color red, she succeeded in imparting to her work a sensational and horrifying effect. Her “Blood Test No. 5” (series A) is troubling. It appears the artist did not turn her face away from horror but chose instead to face it. Yet, unlike Weinstein, it is not clear whose blood is on display. Removing the blood stain from its context confronts the viewer with its universal, powerful essences. It is as if she wanted to declare that blood is

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blood. Her reaction to terror does not reveal whether it is Palestinian or Jewish blood.15 Israeli artists, such as Tartakover and Heiman, can be very critical of the political circumstances, positing that it is the occupation that leads to Palestinian terror. “Holding,” another series by Heiman, deals with the reality of the occupied territories. The artist is making a very clever comparison between those wounded “on our side” and “on their side,” simultaneously clarifying her world-view regarding the occupation. This series fits the direct media art category even more than the blood stain series; there she used images taken directly from the media but chose parts of the image, sometimes enlarging it and in other cases multiplying it, with a result quite different from the original. In “Holding 13” (2004) and “Holding 3” (2001), she hardly interferes with the frame; she points out very basic human activities, such as holding and bonding, which appears on both sides. As can be seen, she sometimes stamps the photos with the phrase “Photographer Unknown.” This is done in order to stress the anonymity of some of the Palestinian press photographers, as opposed to Jewish ones, who are credited for their work.16 “Holding” includes images of both Jews and Palestinians performing or gesticulating in the same way, and chooses specific events where both become victims of the local madness, again insinuating the former victim’s transformation into that of an oppressor. News editor Doron Solomons is increasingly exposed to raw footage of carnage and violence, and the difficulty of mediating this material to the public is a key professional concern for him. In “Father” (2002), he expresses the existential fears shared by parents on both sides. The “Father” is both Palestinian and Israeli, and the voiceover simultaneously speaks Arabic and Hebrew. Like Sodaey, he also focuses on two Palestinian female suicide bombers and includes a poignant “silent” moment as they are about to record the usual clip to be broadcast after the attack. The viewers see them drink and cough during the preparation for the take. This is not the actual shot that will be made public. These moments help the viewer understand the burden of the moment and the tension involved (see Edelsztein 2006, 3).17 This rare view into the moments of absurdity before death occurs greatly intensifies this video. Another frame shows a suicide bomber, intercepted at an intersection and tackled by a robot.18 This process of neutralizing a human bomb with a robot brings the irony of the occupation to a new level. Tartakover, Heiman, and Solomon reduce the gap between their art and the media to nothing. These artists underline the media as the source of their images, exposing themselves to eventual criticism by those who may read these images as mobilized and too close to reality. Alternatively, critics may claim

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that choosing nonaltered, direct media images is at odds with notions regarding the autonomy of art and art as a sophisticated channel of communication. Rendering art immediate and concrete means taking a risk. It also means practically narrowing, almost eliminating the gap between media and art. Those who are not aware of the artists’ political convictions may understand this transparency as a political manifesto. Conclusion A wave of terror has come over Israeli art in the last decade. Research into art’s response to terrorism demonstrates the technical and stylistic pluralism prevalent in Israeli art. In certain cases it also demonstrates the almost entirely voided gap between mass media and art, thus raising troubling questions regarding the autonomy of art. Possibly this is a fighting retreat conducted by art in its aim to penetrate a cultural, communicative, and political agenda. Images pertaining to the definition of direct media art insinuate an aspiration to hold on to relevance, which is why artists have given up on art’s unique and complex language. It is possible that we are given an opportunity to witness art’s clear standing with regard to its failure to deal with horror in an age controlled by the media’s cadence and power. It is also possible that artists fascinated by the terrorist act are willing to embrace provocative and shocking stances learned from Hirst and others, although this type of justification does not seem to follow. As opposed to direct media art, images of the political abstract may be interpreted on various levels. By describing an unmediated context, they might lose some of their political relevance, but it is doubtful whether this will subtract from their value. The fascinating question is, of course, which of these images will become embedded in collective consciousness throughout the decades. It seems that this very concession might just guarantee their place as primary shapers of collective memory in the decades to come. References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a theory of cultural trauma. In Cultural trauma and collective identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arieli-Horowitz, Dana. 2005. Creators in overburden: Rabin’s assassination, art and politics. Jerusalem: Magnes/Hebrew University Press. Coulter-Smith, Graham, and Maurice Owen, eds. 2005. Art in the age of terrorism. London: Paul Holberton.

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Edelsztein, Sergio. 2006. Doron Solomons’s video works: Mind the gap. Tel Aviv: Center for Contemporary Art. Perec, Georges. 1974. Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Editions Galilèe. Ray, Gene. 2005. Terror and the sublime in art and critical theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the torture of others, New York Times Magazine, May 23. Virilio, Paul. 2004. Art and fear. London: Continuum. Z˘i˘zek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the desert of the real: Five essays on September 11 and related dates. London: Verso.

Notes 1. Terror has always been present in Israeli art. During the early 1970s, Pinchas Cohen-Gan (b. 1942), then an art student at the Bezalel art school, was exposed to one of the first waves of terror in Jerusalem. In one of these attacks, he was at the market buying bananas. A second later, a bomb split the air and the fruitseller’s head was blown off. Cohen-Gan has been painting heads ever since. Dganit Berest has also dealt with terrorists. In her work “TWA” from 1998, she used images of airplane hijackers. 2. Throughout the years 2002 to 2006, I conducted sixty open, in-depth interviews with Israeli artists regarding their views on the interrelations between art and politics. Half of the interviews were recently published. Unfortunately, just a fraction of the knowledge and information that enriched those interviews is discussed in this paper (see Arieli-Horowitz 2005). 3. Spain, Northern Ireland, and, after September 11, the United States are just a few examples. Recently the Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF] Exhibition Show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin precipitated a huge debate. This exhibition focused on German art dealing with the Red Army Faction, which was responsible for a decade of terror from 1968 to 1977. It includes depictions of controversial individuals such as Ulrike Meinhoff of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist organization, sometimes with great admiration. Gerhard Richter’s 1988 work “Dead,” exhibited as part of his 18 October 1977 series, was presented at this exhibition. Benjamin Buchloh’s “Note on October 18, 1977” sheds light on this debate. Literature on art and terror is just beginning to appear (see Ray 2005; Coulter-Smith 2005). 4. Alexander claims that a cultural trauma occurs when a group of people feels that they have experienced an event that has marked them deeply. Such an event is so powerful that it may affect their future behavior (see Alexander 2004). 5. In an interview with the BBC held one year after September 11, Demian Hirst said that the attacks were “visually stunning” artworks and that the perpetrators “needed congratulating.” He later apologized. Parts of the interview are quoted in Charles P. Freund, “The Art of Terror,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 2002. One can only wonder if Hirst would still have made the same claim in

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7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Dana Arieli-Horowitz London after the terror acts of July 2005. On Stockhausen, see http://www .andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=14535. Raz has been dealing with barricades since 1992. He started photographing the roadblocks the Israeli army uses during his service as an officer in 1992. The dissonance between being an artist and a soldier was so strong that he was released from further service. The roadblocks gradually developed into the tunnel roads that bypass roads were transformed into during the second Intifada. Guy Raz, “Two Seconds,” 2004–6 (the image is on the cover of the book). The Zaka organization is an ultra-Orthodox organization that voluntarily handles the remains of terror act victims. Gils’s image can be seen at http:// www.archimagazine.com/rbeda.htm This is one of three similar images by Reeb, all entitled “Where are the Soldiers?” Waked’s image can be seen at http://www.universes-in-universe.de/islam/eng/ 2005/10/chic-point/img-05.html. It should be stressed that roadblocks have become a commonplace theme in Israeli art dealing with the occupation from the 1990’s onward. Raz’s project, begun in 1992 in Gaza and entitled “Roadblock Stones,” is probably among the first to deal with the issue. Excerpts from the project were exhibited in the Studio in the winter of 1995 [no. 67], as well as in Ha’aretz newspaper. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, roadblocks have constituted a common theme, especially in journalists’ photography. Among those who concern themselves with this theme are Miki Kratsman, Pavel Wolberg, and Shai Kremer. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, that concern has flowed also into artistic photography, video art, and cinema. Thus Ronen Shamir’s film “Roadblocks,” and Miki Kratsman and Boaz Arad’s video piece “Untitled” from 2002. This video records thousands of Palestinians returning to their homes in the Gaza strip through the Erez roadblock. Sodaey’s image can be seen at http://hcc.haifa.ac.il/gallery/overcraft/artists/ MeravSudaey.htm Here Sodaey’s work and the Zaka organization come to mind. Horesh’s images can be seen at http://www.yoavhoresh.com/viewPhoto.php?dir=photographs/ AFTERMATH&view=large&photo=17 Berest’s image can be seen at http://www.harelart.com/kb35.16.jpg The green banner resembles the famous Benetton campaign of the 1980s, with Oliviero Toscani’s photographs of the banner at its center. One of the bloodstains included in Heiman’s series is a very famous one; it was found in the pocket of Israeli prime minister Y. Rabin immediately after he was assassinated in 1995. Heiman’s image can be seen at http://www.maarav.org.il/items/333/ textAreaImages/ 6.jpg. In Holding 3, Moti Kimhi is the photographer. The image was taken in Tel Aviv and appeared in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, June 3, 2001. In Holding 13, the photographer’s identity is unknown (AP). The image was taken in Bido and appeared in the Ha’aretz daily news, February 27, 2004.

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17. Solomons’s could be seen as paying tribute to Heinrich Böll, Murke’s Collected Silences from 1955. 18. Solomons’s image can be seen at http://www.alondon.net/control/gfx/news/ paranoya-DORON-SOLOMONS.NO2.jpg.

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CHAPTER 3

The Aura of Terror? Kia Lindroos

R

oland Barthes’s famous insight in his La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida) states that the horror of the photograph is that it certifies that the corpse is alive. For him, the photograph of his mother signifies that the person portrayed was alive (then), but is already dead (now). The Barthesian gaze underlines the photograph as temporally twofold, signifying, for instance, life of the dead. Walter Benjamin refers to the temporality of an image as dialectical. In an image, the past has the potential to become crystallized into the moment—into a dialectical image—simultaneously with becoming a part of the mémoire involontaire. The notion of the dialectical image remains on the historical and theoretical levels, and also on the level of the configuration in terms of approaching the epistemological questions of understanding the signs of the present time. My task in this chapter is to touch on various aspects of our present time by highlighting the significance of its images. In connection to this, I will also attempt to reveal some of its epistemology in this sense, that is, to reveal a temporal epistemology of the image. In a photographic image, the flow of time is suddenly interrupted. In this constellation of space and time, the present represents itself (at least) twice. Firstly, every image becomes a sign of the moment in which the photograph was taken; secondly, it is attached to the moment in which the viewer looks at the image. Experiences of historical time, or at least specific parts of it, might be described through vision, as series of images we have confronted through times. In this sense, it is notable that, particularly during the last decade, we have been increasingly bombarded by images of the global media. We are confronted with more and more images of dead bodies, snapshots of

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women and children being carried out of the ruins of bombed houses, suicide bombers who leave video messages outlining their imminent attacks. The experience of death, which has been portrayed, for instance, by modern artists such as Damien Hirst since the 1990s and modern philosophers such as Martin Heidegger since the 1940s, is a reflection that seems to be represented in the public arena more startlingly and strikingly than ever before. We have seen images from concentration camps to Bosnian mass graves, the decomposing and dismembered bodies of soldiers and civilians left in the wake of the attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and so on. These images are imprinted on our minds and, as such, they are increasingly imprinted on the visual memory of our time, as Dana Arieli-Horowitz has well noted (Horowitz 2006; see also her chapter in this volume). The experience of any form of temporality is inherently entangled with the vicious circle of reasons and causes, which continues to question the political rationality of the twenty-first century. Jean Baudrillard has repeatedly claimed that “postmodern” images are no longer linked to real events. Instead, we have lost the principle of reality, and in this manner reality becomes envy of fiction (cf. Baudrillard 2006, 45). However, it seems as though reality has now taken the lead: the events of September 11, 2001, were a surprising sign of the real for most of the witnesses to them. Even Baudrillard seemed to be surprised when confronted with the terrorist attacks in 2001; he views the images as if confronted with the possibility of such an event for the very first time. He writes that the uniqueness of an event lies in the fact that it extends beyond aesthetics and morality (59). It was this specific occasion that awakened his sense of the reality of an event. For him, the sign of the connection between image and reality is the sense of fear. Baudrillard writes, “The first moment is everything” (61). Examining images of terror might help us to prove the point that the temporal ambiguity of the now and the then is worth considering. Terrorist acts are both a cause and result of terror itself; the political phenomenon of terror and most of its causes lie far behind the scenes that are represented in the images of it. The discussion of terror often moves on the level at which one attempts to document acts of terror or reproduce elements of it through visual images, media-shots, documentaries, or Internet blogs. However, I begin and end my thoughts with references to terror expressed through the concept of aura. In doing so, I pose the question of whether there is such a thing as the possibility of shared temporal and political experience. In the background of this question is Benjamin’s claim of the fracturing of experience during the nineteenth century (Benjamin 1933b, 214; 1936b, 439). This split is related to the collapse of narrative forms in Benjamin’s study of

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modern literature. The fracture relates to differentiation of homogeneous experience of time and space, for instance in the field of history and art during the emerging media societies (Lindroos 2001, 19–21). Benjamin notices the diminishing of epic form of exchanging experiences (1936a, 439) and what I am questioning here now is whether it is possible to “save” some elements of the auratic (authentic) experience, such as human suffering and the sense of fear, that is included in the extensive imaginary of terror. I intend to examine the concept of aura and discuss its different definitions as a “dividing tool” that explicates aspects of temporality and political experience in the contemporary visual representations of politics. Different ways of portraying the question of aura (its different “definitions”) also relate to the different aspects of understanding the political content of the images of terror we are confronted with. The epistemology of images opens differently, due to the fact that each of us see/interpret/experience the images in different ways. My examination is fueled by the fact that the question of terror itself addresses a multitude of questions that bridge a yawning gap from issues of truth to morality, including the “originality of time,” dealt with more later in the chapter. Indeed, over the course of this article, I will widen my approach to include the issues of art, aesthetics, and politics, and I will compare some of Jacques Rancière’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas. I will then conclude by returning to these initial thoughts by briefly considering a photograph entitled “Two Seconds” by the Israeli Photographer Guy Raz at the end of this chapter, not merely as an illustration of the foregoing concepts, but rather more so as their visual embodiment. (What Is) Aura? Toward the end of the twentieth century, it was argued that the representation of the Holocaust was approaching the limits of banality by the very normalization of its horrors. Is the increasing imagery of the signs of terror just another echo of banality that haunts our time? Susan Sontag writes in her On Photography that when people were first confronted with the images of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images at all. She writes, “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously . . . when I looked at these photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying” (1977, 20). However often we are confronted with the grief of the others, something is still crying. Through its countless representations, terror becomes

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the systematic distribution of fear and horror that connects “image” and “reality,” as Baudrillard observes, for political purposes. It establishes the political experience of the present time. As noted earlier, I intend to discuss the possibility of reaching out to some aspects of our present experience by examining the idea of visual representation through the concept of aura. I am aware, however, that this question creates a rather strange paradox, and with this paradox, I intend to point out how Benjamin opens conditions for modern aesthetic experience. One of the early “definitions” of the concept of aura comes from Karl Kraus. He writes, “The closer I look, the greater the distance appears between us” (modified by Benjamin 1939, 647). This is one of the starting points in understanding visual experience: in order to be able to look closely, one has to create a sense of distance between oneself and the image to be viewed, which is precisely where the “dividing tool” of aura comes into play and opens up a space for a specific ethos of seeing (that I will specify in the next section). Here, distance becomes a sign of reason in the midst of the irrationality of the events. The impossibility, disbelief, and mythical meanings given to the surrounding images leads us to question whether the things we see in images are as real as the events they portray or whether they are a part of the “imagery of terror” that is already building up a logic of its own, individually from the spectators. Benjamin provides another example of aura in relation to the experience of the landscape and nature, as he describes the dualistic and simultaneous sense of distance and presence. The thought-image refers to the simultaneous perception of distant mountains and the branch of a tree by a relaxed observer of nature on a Sunday afternoon.1 This describes the unique phenomenon of experiencing distance, although the object of focus is right in front of our eyes. In this case, the distance refers not only to spatial and temporal distance but also to the ambiguous distance between an experience and its possibility. By using such an example, I am not claiming that images of terror might have anything in common with the sense of relaxation and experience of nature as such. Rather, I understand the concept of aura, through Benjamin’s example, as the ability to sense the distance of a present experience, however close the perception of the media might appear. This distance refers firstly to the attempt to reason and secondly to the attempt to remain conscious of the manipulation of the gaze, that is, a sign of the artificially projected aura, of which I will give an example later on. Examining the visual representations of politics adds to our understanding of the fact that time is the constitutive moment of representation. If we follow the postmodern theory of representation, there is nothing to represent

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since thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault have presented the notion of the disappearance of the “original” moment. Representation itself is understood as constructive in relation to the ways in which we conceive political, social, and aesthetic realities. Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 imply that this specific act of terror positions the event before the representation (Baudrillard 2006, 51). This causes a rupture in any claim of the simulacra of media representation. The notion that the sense of spectatorship and the object of the spectator’s gaze are supposed to move in a new direction after 9/11 is an exception among visual representations of politics, since Baudrillard understands the visual representation of the events as a real event in itself. Reality and representation are closely intertwined, as the terror attack is essentially a visual experience and not part of the simulation. In fact, the reality of death is an interruptive moment in the simulation. An act of terror that intends to maximize the number of casualties with the suicide of the perpetrators includes an aspect that escapes the conceptualization—it escapes the rational. The contingency of the time and place of terrorist attacks is even more contingent than the systematic destruction of the Holocaust. In this sense, what we are seeing is the gap, the irrationality of the moment, which escapes the attempts of rationalization by its very existence.2 This gap/sublime moment is something that appears quite often in political aesthetics, since it points precisely toward the ambiguity of experience and the impossibility of representing the moment—any moment—in its “entirety.” When we look at Benjamin’s conceptualization, the moment becomes significant as a sign of singularity. From my viewpoint, the ambiguity of the sublime moment actually reflects the character of Benjamin’s concept of aura. In Benjamin’s early work, the idea of experience and the moment of experiencing are closely related to the terms of knowledge and truth, and the problems related to their expression.3 The issues of the truth, origins, and limits of knowledge are also significantly present in the conception of aura. The background of Benjamin’s approach is delineated by its philosophical confrontation with Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. In the following, I will highlight only some issues related to this confrontation. Critique as Judgment Kant’s aesthetic theory, in which the attributes of beauty and “sublimity” are transferred to the subject as the experience of pleasure or displeasure, occupies an established position that is still valued today. In his Third Critique, Kant describes how the “pure judgment of taste” is neither interested in nor intrigued by the existence of the object (Kant 1799/1993). For him, free

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beauty is pleasurable, because its perception assures the subject of his or her cognitive ability, and it is achieved only when the judgment of taste retains its sensuous charm and moral connotations. For Benjamin, this is not the case, since he denies the possibility of making timeless judgments. Instead, judgment comes closer to the issue of critique as an intellectual attitude toward one’s “own” time.4 Here is the moment of perception (including the possibility of critique) that I call the ethos of seeing. Within Benjamin’s conception of critique, both the subject and object of perception are interwoven in terms of the specific temporal character of perceived time and the time of perception.5 Unlike Kant, Benjamin thinks about the formation of judgments as “free” from nontemporal moral connotations and instead, he includes a moment of critique, as an aspect of subjective ethos. Thus, as a response to the Kantian exclusion of the subject, Benjamin introduces subjectivity and temporality as part of the aesthetic judgment and critique (Benjamin 1940, 1247). For Benjamin, truth exists an sich in the singular phenomena, but if and how it is perceived depends on the perceiver (1925, 210–12). Also, the attention paid to temporality introduces a significant element in the concept of critique: the attention to time and the moment of history is also part of its ethos. Any judgment, for instance one taking the form of critique, is bound with a context that is formed by visual perception; technological means of representation; and aesthetic, political, and historical contexts. For Benjamin, it is possible to recover the “truth” of a moment in a way similar to that in which he later describes historical-philosophical and temporal moments—as including the possibility of the moment of salvation (Erlösung).6 This notion adds a theological aspect to the characteristic of the aesthetic experience. The relationship between history and redemption lacks the aspect of mediation and thus establishes a rupture in the linearly understood course of history. The moment of salvation can thus be as simple as the mere remembrance of the past or salvation of the future. It establishes the image of reality and meaning for events, which are otherwise seen only as fluently occurring and passing with the flow of time. Particularly in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” Benjamin emphasizes the past as being an image, which may be associated but not identified with a graphic or photographic image (Benjamin 1940, 695).7 For Benjamin, aesthetic judgment is a temporal matter, a moment of critique and experience. As such, it is also a transient and transforming matter, although the question of judgment does ultimately belong to the realm of epistemology.8 The emphasis of the moment of authenticity, which is only approachable as an image (Bild), refers to the concept of origin, which

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Benjamin discussed in his research on “The Origins of German Tragic Drama.” For him, the temporality of the concept of origins is not related to the past, but has a strong connection with the present, as the origins of the moment are to be localized in the authenticity of the present time. From my perspective, the concept of aura expresses this authenticity (Benjamin 1925, 226). The concept of image is also linked to Benjamin’s interest in analogies and their appearance in the perception of a single moment (Benjamin 1933a, 206). The acknowledgement of the (nonsensuous) similitude is instantaneous. While the perception happens very quickly, it provides a glimpse into the potential sphere of the recognition of the similitude of phenomena, a possibility created by knowledge that is presumed to be transferred from the prerational conception of knowledge and experience, as it emphasizes the immediate moment of knowledge (Benjamin 1919, 32). Benjamin notes in his discussion of Franz Kafka’s work that the only major moral commitment an individual should have is to his or her own time, not to a universal idea of time and history (Benjamin GS II, 1199). I take this notion as an attempt to detach himself from the universal idea of morality. Here, it also includes the ethos of seeing as Benjamin highlights the ability to pay attention to the issues of specific time that require moral judgment—or immanent (and speculative) critique. The Political Image The Benjaminian gaze requires that we pay attention to both the nonsensuous and sensuous meanings of an image, the invisible connections and similarities within an image itself as well as the references to its contexts (Benjamin 1933a, 209). This stems from his earlier thought, in which Benjamin considers language to also contain both audio-visual and visual elements. This extended concept of language includes, for instance, the “language” of music, images, the plastic arts, and the techniques of expressing the spiritual content that is being mediated (1916, 140). Benjamin intends to relativize the limits between seeing, reading, and thinking, and in so doing, he highlights various ways of experiencing phenomena through different forms of sensual knowledge. For instance, he offers thought-images (Denkbilder) as completing and also challenging the discursive side of thinking, as thinking for him is not only rational/discursive, but also includes visual activity and visual aspects of thought. What is significant here, and clearly resonates with the observations of both Barthes and Baudrillard, is that the images used to

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express the epistemologies of the present have access to various nondiscursive and irrational elements (memories, hopes, and fears) as well. Consequently, when I discuss the conception of aura in connection with the visual representations of terror, it is important to pay attention to the broader context, which refers not only to the visible but also to the invisible connections and similarities that are indications of the larger context. The concept of aura highlights different aspects of the reflection on the political sides of images. Firstly, the so-called artificial auratic projection is intended to manipulate the subjective gaze for ideological/political purposes. This appears in Benjamin’s discussion on the rituality cult and Fascist aestheticization of politics that I will highlight later on. Secondly, the auratic refers to the sense of originality as the authenticity of the moment in time. It includes the philosophical question of the possibility of “shared” experience, closely related to the terms of knowledge and truth, and the aspects of temporality, related to their expression. In the political sphere, this relates to the avantgarde, as I will discuss with the example of Dada. The aura as originality is a sign, much in the same way as Baurillard conceived the sign of the real, that enables the “authentic” representation of origins, in this case the moment of fear, death, grief, and sorrow that is represented in the present moment of seeing. This second meaning is an example of auratic presence, and the experience of the present time is that side of the aura, which cannot be technologically transferred (Benjamin 1936a, 366). Thirdly, the decay of aura, or its “scattering,” and its consequences brings with it a possibility to understand art as an opening toward a new space of experiences (Spielraum). The best example of this is cinema, in which the auratic distance is broken in the way in which the “man on the street” might become a potential “actor” in a scene. The example of cinema that Benjamin uses here has a special reference with respect to Soviet Cinema and Dziga Vertov’s films (1936a, 369, 371–72). Nowadays, with the possibilities of immediate digital projections and representations, this has a hugely different meaning and space of experience than it did during the 1930s. This scattering of the auratic distance draws the subject of perception directly into the scene of an image, an idea that seems to be linked to Benjamin’s concept of the image-space (Bildraum). The imagespace poses the question of how to conceptualize subjectivity and subjective perception as a space of reflection in which the spatial and temporal borders between object and subject are seen to vanish, as the limits between subject and object merge in perception and experience (Benjamin 1929, 309). This requires an awareness of the role of perception when examining digital or media projections. It is also to be understood as a critique of the passive reception and spectatorship of the overflow of images.

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Benjamin describes aura as the “cover” under which the uniqueness of the work of art is hidden (1936a, 368; 1922; 1959). With the first notion of aura, Benjamin notes that in the transfer of a personal aura to its reception by an audience, one can artificially, for instance, with technological means, construct a feeling of identification with the presence of an actor projected on screen. It was precisely this possibility to create aura through reproduction that was utilized in fascist aesthetics. In the context of the 1930s, the focus was to create mass propaganda and identification with the politicized values, for instance, in images of nation or race. The political interpretation of art notes an important change in the production of art, particularly when its authenticity suffers; its social function is seen as being overturned. Benjamin suggests that the transfer from rituals toward politics discloses the moment of the new, from which the rituality of aura is distinctly absent, and that art is thus brought closer to the perceiver and brought down to earth from its mythical stance (Benjamin 1936a, 357). The understanding of political art in terms of rituality (the first conception of political art) is directly associated with fascist politics that, in Benjamin’s view, continues the ritual value of art in terms of its praxis of the aestheticization of politics (ästhetisierung der Politik in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936a, 382). This interpretation outlines the idea of modernity as an “era” of reproducibility and the emerging differences in political and aesthetic representation. Benjamin’s use of the term aesthetic, particularly in his claim on the aestheticization of politics, is notable due to its specific reference. This notion refers to the representations of unification and similitude, which are inherent in the construction of an ideological “mass.” It is the ideologized mass that is the object of a fascist aestheticization of politics.9 The German National Socialists’s use of traditional values for ideological purposes led to the establishment of an ideological interpretation of tradition, origins, and rituals. For instance, the eternal idea of cultic art was clearly reproduced in fascist politics. In his Theorien der deutschen Faschismus, Benjamin describes the cultic element of war as expressed by the idea of “eternal” war (Benjamin 1930, 241, emphasis added). As such, artists not only expressed the ideals of the National Socialist aesthetics but also participated in the creation of the new human ideal and “purified” human being, thus playing a crucial role in the construction of the “eternal” Germany. As Benjamin understands the cult as being essentially tied to the concept of aura, he refers to how traditional works of art were created as props in magic and later religious rituals. This historical origin means that if the traditional meaning of art is retained, it cannot be approached as free from its ritualistic function (1936a, 356). Only by reconceptualizing art can it be

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liberated from this function, and Benjamin’s interpretation of the role of avant-garde art from the beginning of the century is based on his emphasis on its attempt to free itself from rituals. The detachment from tradition almost became the main purpose of certain forms of art, for instance Dadaism, which denied the idea of contemplation and the eternal value of art. To highlight the second meaning of political art, I would like to point out some of the ways in which Dada manifested this turn in the history of art. According to Benjamin, Dada was attempting to complete something, which painting and literature had been leading up to until the beginning of the twentieth century. This took place in what was only a short transitional period, yet Dada managed to capture almost all the aspects that characterized the Benjaminian conception of the avant-garde and, as such, created a rupture in the idea of art and aesthetics, thereby creating another kind of connection to politics. Firstly, Dadaist art differed radically from the canon of art history. Secondly, Dadaists did not attempt to hide historical or individual barbarism but, rather, expressed it directly. Their intention was to create a scandal and inspire public indignation (Benjamin 1936a, 379). Another interesting element of Dadaism and also later Surrealism was that they did not intend to exclude (or distinguish) the irrational and evil aspects of art, but instead created an artistic legitimization of their presence in society. This contradiction forced a change in perception that, in turn, led to scandals and the rethinking of aesthetic values and experience (378). Dada expressed a true example of auratic art, in the sense of its detachment from contemplation and the eternity-value of art. It manifested the destruction of that kind of aura, which can be ideologically constructed. However, if understood as the moment of here and now, it is precisely the aura of originality and presence that remained in Dadaist works. Dada’s most important innovation was the identification of a potential cultural sphere, which would simultaneously destroy the ties of the cult and through this also the mythical idea of art. The reaction to Dadaism was not intended to be contemplative or mental, but, rather, physical, which was similar to the shocked reactions to early cinematic experiences. It was in this immediate temporality and physicality connected to action that Dadaism’s political component lay. Today, this idea or concept of physically shocking art might be applied, for instance, to Damien Hirst’s work, which examines the processes of life and death: the ironies, falsehoods, and desires that we mobilize in order to negotiate our own alienation and mortality. “You kill things to look at them” (Hirst regarding his work in “Natural History”; see also “When Logics Die” 1991; “Anaesthetics” 1991; “In and Out of Love” 1991).10

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In this context, I would like to refer to Jacques Rancière’s conception of art and politics, which is expressed, for instance, in the interview from 2004. Rancière notes that: Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with respect to those functions. It is political insofar as it frames not only works or monuments, but also a specific space-time sensorium, as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart, of being inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of, etc. It is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sensorium. (2004)

Thus, Rancière also refers to the aspects of time and space as creating the specific aspects of politics in art. As he puts it, “Politics is . . . the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as ‘common’ and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them” (2004). First and foremost, for Rancière, politics seems to envelop the sphere of experience, the reality of common objects and the capacity of the subjects. Since Rancière makes explicit reference to Benjamin, I will compare some aspects of both of their concepts of art and politics. There are obvious similarities in their connection of the political aspect in art to the time/space experience, rather than to the representation of political issues as such. One of the obvious differences between the two, however, is related to the discussion of the problem of the common and its relationship to the “common sensorium.” For Benjamin, although the problem of the common is extremely central to his work, it is not explicitly discussed. For instance, his view of the connection between the decay of aura and changes in perception was related to how he saw the masses (die Masse) as related to new forms of perception. Benjamin was interested in the ways in which the masses were distributed through the changes of individual perception and experience. To highlight this, he distinguished between that of a compact and more passive idea of the masses and that of the revolutionary and more individual idea of the masses (for instance, Benjamin 1936a, 370; 1939, 618). In other words, as an outgrowth of technological reproducibility (of art, but later also media) Benjamin notes how the forms of perception change. Firstly, new forms of

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perception appear to forge a “passive” and compact mass or group whose gaze is “easy to manipulate.” This is the critique of the Frankfurt school. However, what makes Benjamin different is that he also points out the positive aspects of the changed perception, the new forms of art (avant-garde) and the impact of film/media that made one “see differently.” So, there is no homogeneous mass perception, but the “fragmented” masses that were to see things, also in real life, differently than before. The problem of the sense of the common and its relation to aesthetics appears in the work of a number of thinkers. It is dealt with, for example, throughout Lyotard’s work in general and his discussion on Kant’s sensus communis (Kant 1993, sec. 40) in particular. Lyotard deals with the sense of community by posing the question of what sensus would serve to bring a community together. Lyotard transforms the idea of community from a feeling of coherence to the question of its intelligibility (Lyotard 1992, 2). In doing so, he provides us with a Kantian reading of the problem. Rancière more or less seems to accept the common as something that “is embodied in a common sensorium,” which is where he most clearly differs from Benjamin. The idea of common experience and perception is something that Benjamin explicitly questions with his notion of aura. Benjamin claims that the fragmenting of the feeling of the community and, for example, the perceived sense of community emerged during modernity. The Benjaminian reconstruction of the community and the possibility of common experience calls for the reconceptualization of both its meaning/sensus and its feeling/coherence (Lindroos 2001). The common, as nonexistent matter an sich, always requires legitimation, and it should be reworked in every temporal situation. Furthermore, the “social” does not exist in Benjamin’s work as such, but, rather, it requires legitimation in time and space. For Benjamin, it is possible to reconstruct social coherence through tradition. However, this leads to the problem of legitimation in an era in which the previous conception of knowledge no longer reflects the actual historical, social, and aesthetic conditions. The question of this legitimation of the common (or community) is problematized to a certain extent in contemporary political philosophy, for instance by Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Benedict Anderson. Yet, Jacques Rancière seems to take the community for granted, for example, regarding his conception of the politics of aesthetics in relation to this question. For Rancière, politics begins “when they who have ‘no time’ to do anything else than their work take that time that they have not in order to make themselves visible as sharing in a common world and prove that their mouth indeed emits common speech instead of merely voicing

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pleasure or pain.” He calls the redistribution of times and spaces, places and identities, framing and reframing the visible and the invisible, of telling speech from noise, the partition of the sensible (Rancière 2004). Interestingly, Rancière notes that “politics and art are not two separate and permanent realities about which one should ask whether they have to be connected or not”; he also refers to democracy and the theater as two forms of the same partition of the sensible, as “two forms of heterogeneity, that are dismissed at the same time to frame the republic as the ‘organic life’ of the community” (Rancière 2004). The question can also be examined from exactly the opposite perspective, beginning from the singular and the fracture (partition). In other words, single images can be conceptualized, for example, as temporal entities that include the essential characteristics of both their historical and political contexts, yet retain their own temporality. Now, to make a temporal leap, one might describe the war on terror as a movement that is tied to rituals and cults. Its goal is the destruction of the “opposing forces” and this conflict departs from the supposition that the parties to this conflict share no common ground or commonly held experiences. As such, we could ask what “community” is actually the target of terror? My claim, modifying the Benjaminian premises here, is that the community (the sense of the common) is created here through the opposing and conflicting activities: both the terrorist acts as much as the military retaliations against them. The sense of the common, as fragile and temporal as it might be, is created through the threats, fears, and other manifestations of power. The social divisions between good and evil, friend and enemy are constructed in order to reinforce the narrative around the issue of terror. Terror and Contemporary Imagery Earlier in this chapter, I reversed the conception of aura and its connection to the different forms of politics: those of the ritual and the intention to break from it. Similarly, there are projections within the images of terror that are auratic in the ambiguous sense of the word. Some of the images are merely reproducing the cults, rituality, ideologically eternal values, and conflicts that surround terror. Yet there are also images of terror that have the power to break from this tradition of self-repetition. Some of these projections represent a rather sad and unintelligent picture of our times, causing the omnipresent illusion of fear. The recreation and reproduction of the images of cultic figures seems to be one of the goals in the “eternal war on terrorism.” For instance, the media followed military forces

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as they hunted Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 terror attacks. No one knew whether Osama was dead or alive, and there were a number of attempts to produce an artificial aura around him. He became a cultic figure with the support of contemporary commercial market forces: Osama t-shirts, leaflets, newspaper articles, and so on, which all supported the cult of bin Laden. Despite the images that constitute cultic figures, there are plenty of indications of the authenticity of both the experiences and suffering of the people. We could pose the very legitimate question of how the contemporary spectator is supposed to approach the tragic drama that is being played out in the media today. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, for example, has pointed out a number of different forms of the expression of public power. Firstly, it is the theater of public, judicial torture, and execution. This is “great tragic theatre,” as Foucault describes it, and it takes place on the public stage. Secondly, there is the theater of discipline and surveillance: the former is openly displaying power at work, while the latter hides it under layers of moral-political, legal, and philosophical justifications and ideals. This kind of theater takes place in a number of smaller, melodramatic theaters that are distributed throughout the society (Foucault 1980, 16–24). Both of these forms of exercising power are present in the visual representations of terror. However, the prerequisite concerning the ethos of experiencing the images is that the spectators be understood as actors, as participants in this bloodshed, and as part of the forces of destruction. The public cannot dominate this theater from a safe distance, but must actually and actively take part in what is happening on the “stage.” This is a visual space of cross-reference in which every spectator is also a spectacle and every spectacle is also a spectator. This is the image-space characterized by Benjamin. The need to participate is visible at least in the fragile moment of critique. Indeed, one cannot portray an image of the whole picture; rather, we must make due with single representations that express the will to take part in the events and the ambiguous dilemma of truth, presence, and absence. For Jacques Rancière, the “politics of aesthetics” rests on the paradox of the linkage of two opposite equalities as ultimately shaping the two main forms of “politics.” I have explicitly used the conception of aura to signify this original paradox. The first form of the political aims at connecting the two equalities, as in Benjamin’s interpretation, highlights political art in terms of rituality and process of identification with politically constructed values. For Rancière, “this means transforming the freedom and equality of the autonomous aesthetic sphere” into a collective existence in which they will no longer be a matter of form and appearance, but will be embodied in the materiality of everyday experience (2004). I see this notion as closely connected to

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what Benjamin meant, by the way, in which the (illusion) of the autonomy of art disappears already through the process of reproducibility (1936a, 362). This means that the social and political conditions of works of art, and aesthetics in general, are in a process of transformation within any era of reproducibility, and in fact, the aesthetic dimension in the social and political sphere (that is already extant), becomes more apparent. The second form of the political disconnects politics from aesthetics. For Rancière, “it disconnects the free and equal space of aesthetic experience from the infinite field of the equivalence of art and life. To the self-suppressing politics of art becoming life, it opposes a politics of the resistant form. . . . The egalitarian potential is enclosed in the dissensuality of the work, in its belonging to an autonomous sphere, indifferent to any program of social transformation or any participation in the adornment of prosaic life. Political avant-gardism and artistic avant-gardism would fit together out of their very lack of connection” (2004). Benjamin draws a similar, but not identical rupture that the avant-garde manifests, especially when one tries to understand the connection between art and politics. I have pointed out ways in which Benjamin indicates the rupture that the avant-garde (here through the example of Dada) creates, in which Benjamin observes that the resistance is a form of politics per se. It is the resistance and rupture that forms the connection between the political and aesthetic realms, and not the lack of connection, as it seems to be for Rancière. Guy Raz: Two Seconds? The example I take here to outline the space of experience, as a possibility for gaining a moment of authenticity, is from a series of photographs by Guy Raz. In these photographs, we do not see people, as in the example of Figure 3.1. We do not see bodies or corpses or eyes looking directly into the camera. Instead, we see a place and time, something that is simultaneously abstract and very concrete. As I have outlined earlier, Benjamin’s concept of aura highlights different aspects of the reflection on the political sides of images. The artificial auratic projection is intended to manipulate the subjective gaze for ideological/political purposes. As I look at Raz’s image here, I would rather highlight that connotation of aura, which refers to the sense of originality and the experience of authenticity of the present moment in time. It is a sign that enables the representation as well as the experience of origins, in this case the potential moment of fear, death, grief, and sorrow. Benjamin took the example of cinema as something in which the auratic distance was broken down in similar manner to that of the “man on the

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Figure 3.1 Guy Raz, “Two Seconds,” 2004–2006.

street” becoming a potential “actor.” Raz’s photograph describes the possibility of the event, in which the “man on the street” also becomes a potential victim. We actually see the movement of a bus that is crossing both time and space. The movement is toward the time to come, whose possible emptiness contains both the past and the future as a space of disappearance, as opposed to the horizon of expectation (Koselleck 1992). The moment is gone, but the image remains. One might experience a sense of distance here that refers not only to spatial and temporal distance, but also to some ambiguous distance of a shared experience and the question of its possibility. If one looks closer, one recognizes that the bus in the photo is just one of many buses that might well turn out being destroyed itself. Consequently, the time and place of the two seconds captured in the image has a very political meaning. Following Dana Arieli-Horowitz’s interpretation, Guy Raz understands his photographs as an example of abstract political art. In the project Two Seconds, he relates directly to acts of terror. “He is fascinated with time; two seconds is the time it takes the suicide bomber to trigger [his/her] explosive belt. Two seconds is also the time that Raz keeps the aperture adjuster open” (Arieli-Horowitz 2006, 13). What transforms the time and place of this photograph into something political is that Raz chose specific sites in Israel where acts of terror have occurred. This might be self- evident for an Israeli viewer, however, if the viewer does not know the sites, he or she only sees the abstract image. Ironically, the way his buses are “literally spread all over the image turns the result into something that might be considered

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surrealistically beautiful despite the fact that it represents terror” (ArieliHorowitz 2006, 13). The image maintains its aesthetic aspect of the sublime, since it has both an interesting form and content and it focuses on the aspect of experiencing horror. In conclusion, I see Raz’s image as portraying an opening toward that kind of political space of experiences I have opened through this chapter. As such, it includes the conception of an image that requires the perceiver to be drawn into the “image-space” (Bildraum), with the interpretation that requires the ethos of seeing I have outlined in this chapter. To draw from Rancière’s interpretation, the photograph represents the “original paradox,” linking two forms of politics into something that connects the autonomous sphere of aesthetics with the materiality of everyday experience (2004). In addition to this, the photograph itself constitutes a political time/space. It demands critique in its very existence, as portraying both the abstract and concrete, both presence and absence. It includes aspects of hopes and memories, without escaping the sense of fear. The idea of the dialectical image returns on a historical and theoretical level in such an instance, as well as on the level of a configuration in terms of approaching the epistemological questions of understanding the signs of the present time in a way that, at this time, escapes the banality of merely ritual projections from a history that has tended to normalize the horrors and suffering. Guy Raz represents the “event” in the space of the political and aesthetic moment. What happens is simultaneously real and potential; it represents political experience and, as such, is also a sublime representation of the epistemology of the present time, that is, its temporal epistemology. The political signifies both an experience of terror and something that might be called an experience of “wounded” time and space. Namely, duration is also a site—a space that shows the movement in and across time. The main question regarding the conception of aura is ambiguity, which also adds the aspect of intervisuality to each image. Making any experience of the phenomenon of terror possible requires the extension of the limits of the concept of experience. This is the point at which the concept of aura is at its most ambiguous, although this ambiguity and the feelings of discomfort created by it do not justify its annihilation or complete destruction. Perhaps there is a reason why the images of terror cause this distance and closeness, sense of cult and ritual, and, ultimately, the uncomfortable experience of the present time and its origins. The uncomfortable feeling of the images of terror is caused by the unambiguous experience of death that is experienced within the viewer. There is the possibility of denial and the possibility of acceptance; to accept and approach death within life provides us

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with a level of courage that might lead us to overcome the “danger” within historical images (Benjamin 1940, 695). From my point of view, this requires the acceptance of the ambiguity of our times, portrayed through violence, rituals, cult, and the experience of temporality in its chromatic depth. References Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. Sublime historical experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arieli-Horowitz, Dana. 2006. Art and terror: The Israeli case. Paper presented at the symposium Art and Terror, May 29–June 1, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Barthes, Roland. 1980. La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Camera lucida: Reflections on photography). Seuil: Gallimard. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. Terrorismin henki (The spirit of terrorism and requiem for the twin towers). Trans. Olli Sinivaara. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto. Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften (GS). Eds. Tiedemann, Rolf und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1940. Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, GS I.2. ———. 1940. Die neue Thesen, GS I.3. ———. 1939. Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, GS I.2. ———. 1936a. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Zweite Fassung, GS VII.1. ———. 1936b. Der Erzähler, GS II.2. ———. 1933a. Lehre vom ähnlichen, GS II.1. ———. 1933b. Erfahrung und Armut, GS II.1. ———. 1932. Aus einer kleinen Rede über Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Geburtstag gehalten, GS II.3. ———. 1930. Theorien der deutschen Faschismus, GS III. ———. 1929. Der Surrealismus, GS II.I. ———. 1925. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels GS I.1. ———. 1922. Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, GS I.1. ———. 1919. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, GS I.1. ———. 1916. Über dies Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen. GS II.1. Caygill, Howard. 1998. Walter Benjamin: The colour of experience. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Tarkkailla ja rangaista (Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison). Keuruu: Otava. Kant, Immanuel. 1799/1993. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Felix Meiner Verlag: Hamburg. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1992. Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Futures past: On the semantics of historical time). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Lindroos, Kia. 2006. Benjamin’s moment. Redescriptions 10: 115–33. ———. 2001. Scattering community: Benjamin on experience, narrative and history. Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (6): 19–41.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. 1992. Sensus communis. In Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 1–25. London and New York: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The politics of aesthetics, an interview with Bojana Cvejic, August 9, 2004, http://theater.kein.org/node/99. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Other Sources Hirst, Damien. 1997. I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now. London: Monacelli.

Notes 1. “Was ist eigentlich Aura? Ein sonderbares Gespinst aus Raum und Zeit; einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag. An einem Sommernachmittag ruhend einem Gebirgszug am Horizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der sein Schatten auf den ruhenden wirft—das heißt die Aura dieser Berge, dieses Zweiges atmen” (Benjamin 1936a, 355). 2. The aesthetic gap might be approached through the concept of the sublime. However, I refer here only generally to Kenneth Burke’s concept of the sublime, which is further investigated, for instance, by Frank Ankersmit (2005). 3. Especially in Benjamin 1922 and 1925. 4. I would underline Howard Caygill’s interpretation of Benjamin’s conception of “immanent Critique” here (Caygill 1998, 34–72). 5. This idea of critique may be compared to Benjamin’s concept of an image-space (Bildraum), in which the distinctive limits between signified/signifier and aesthetic subject/object seem to break down in intellectual reflection (Benjamin 1929, 302, 309). 6. I discuss this concept more thoroughly in Lindroos 2006. 7. Benjamin’s concept of image is actually quite extensive, as it also refers to internal and mental images, such as images of memory or acts of knowledge (Erkenntnis). 8. This discussion is outlined, for instance, in Benjamin’s dissertation (1919) and in the Goethe essay (1922). 9. The ways in which Benjamin constructs the idea of aestheticization of politics is tied to the question in which he sees the “masses” (die Masse) to be formed during the times of technical reproducibility of art. Here, his concept of the “masses” is quite different from that of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. 10. Damien Hirst (b. 1965) curated the widely acclaimed “Freeze” exhibition in 1988 while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College. Hirst graduated from Goldsmiths in 1989, and he has since gone on to become one of the most famous living British artists. Moreover, In and Out of Love (1991) was an installation for which a gallery was filled with hundreds of live tropical butterflies,

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Kia Lindroos while The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) at the Saatchi Gallery displayed his infamous tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. With the latter installation, Hirst became a media icon and, since then, has been “imitated, parodied, reproached, and exalted by the media and public alike” (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hirst.html; see also Hirst 1997, and http://www.picassomio.com/DamienHirst/en).

PART 2

Fictionalizing Terror

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CHAPTER 4

Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West Margaret Heller

The Terror of Nihilism

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n the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, one often heard people say that nothing would be the same again: something terrifyingly new had erupted, changing the political landscape forever. Yet at the same time that this particular act of terror was experienced as the shock of the new, there were attempts by theorists almost immediately to discover its larger meaning by going back to the past, and since 2001, a number of books on the subject have been published, one example being Terry Eagleton’s Holy Terror (2005). Some have turned especially to Dostoyevsky’s great political novel The Possessed, also called The Devils or Demons, with its portrayal of a group of nihilists, in order to gain insight into the motivations underlying present-day terrorists. Notable among these would be André Glucksmann, whose 2002 Dostoïevski à Manhattan proclaims on its back cover that “il faut sous-titrer CNN avec Dostoïevski” (we must subtitle CNN with Dostoyevsky). On the face of it, the relevance of Dostoyevsky to twenty-first century Islamicist terrorism is not self-evident, for the nineteenth-century Russian nihilists he describes were revolutionaries wanting to create a new order based on human reason, and the members of al Qaeda are religious fundamentalists wanting the restoration of an older order under God. Yet some evident parallels do exist. One is that Dostoyevsky portrays the leaders of the Russian nihilists as young men with privileged, even aristocratic, backgrounds. There has been an influential analysis of September 11 within the Left, one associated

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most with the work of Noam Chomsky, which holds that it was a comprehensible act of retribution for the economic inequalities of the world order favoring the West. Yet this particular instance of terrorism was not perpetrated by the materially dispossessed. Bin Laden, as we all know, was born into a tremendously wealthy and influential family with close connections to Saudi royalty, and the al Qaeda terrorists often seem to have been the children of professionals. Something else moved them, something beyond the rationality of purely economic motives. It would seem that Dostoyevsky’s novel, through its powerful examination of the spiritual and psychic dimensions of the modern condition, might be a better source for understanding that which exceeds the motivations recognized by contemporary political science, dependent as it is upon the calculus of rational choices for its analysis. The psychological roots of terror are typically identified in one of two ways, both employing the language of Nietzsche. The first is that of ressentiment: terrorism is held to be fueled by envy of the success of the West and feelings of cultural humiliation. This argument is made most notably by Bernard Lewis. The second is that of nihilism: terrorism is held to be the consequence of the loss of values in late modernity. This is claimed by Glucksmann himself, who argues that nihilism is characteristic of modern Western culture and that it has spread everywhere; we are in an era of “nihilisme mondialisé,” in which only death gives meaning. Even terrorism motivated by religion is an expression of nihilism, for terrorists act as if there are no limits to human activity (Glucksmann 2003, 1). Whether ressentiment or nihilism is the culprit, what should be remarked is that both theories entail claims about “the West.” In the first case, terrorism is said to be a reaction against the West’s success, the vengeance of an alien culture seeking to reassert itself. In the second case, modern terrorism, even that of radical Islamicism, is said to be a symptom of a West whose values have been globally disseminated by its technology, economy, and culture. The claim that I am most concerned with here, one that links terrorism to a nihilism arising from the impasses of Western modernity, is an instance of the latter. But one way or another, we find a whole range of Orientalisms and Occidentalisms, or of stereotypes of both East and West, invoked by those who seek to discover the roots of terror. In Dostoyevsky’s writings, there are moments that would indicate the author’s support for both tendencies, but his views cannot be reduced to either. Nihilism and Terrorism in the European West The thought that terrorism and nihilism belong together is not a new one, for there is a close connection between the history of the two terms, both in their origins in late eighteenth-century Europe and in their elaboration during the

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nineteenth century in Russia. They were, in fact, coined roughly in the same period, the time of the French Revolution. The first use of terrorism seems to have been in the 1790s, and it then referred to the program of the French revolutionary state (Laqueur 1977, 6). While in contemporary usage, terrorism was typically used as the label for exceptional and nonstate violence, the Jacobins believed that terror was a legitimate tool of government. Nihilism, in contrast, seems to have first been introduced as a philosophical term. In 1799, Friedrich Jacobi used it to characterize Enlightenment thought as a whole and Kantian critical reason in particular, which he argued reduced being to nothingness (di Giovanni 2006). Then a connection between the philosophy of nihilism and the politics of terror was made by Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic conservative, who argued that the former’s assertion of human freedom from authority had, as its necessary consequence, the latter. Maistre’s denunciations of theophobia, “the insurrection against God,” nihilism (rienisme), and any belief in political progress due to human enlightenment, were especially influential in Russia as the result of his period of exile in that country (Billington 1970, 272). Friedrich Schlegel, another figure of Catholic Romanticism who had a considerable impact on Russian thought, also makes clear the practical consequences of nihilism. He writes in his Philosophy of History that the devil, the principle of negation, “since the commencement of his emancipation in modern times,” has become the spirit of the age itself, for now eternity is devalued in relation to the temporal world (Schlegel 1883, 475). The modern assertion of human freedom has resulted in nothing else than “bloody warfare, and a fatal struggle of life and death, protracted beyond a century” (475). Only religion will save us: “Christianity is the emancipation of the human race from the bondage of that inimical spirit who denies God, and, as far as in him likes, leads all created intelligences astray” (474). Maistre and Schlegel express, and historically helped develop, the traditionalist antimodernist narrative, which mapped the orthodox Christian account of sin, being individual man’s preference of his own will to God’s, onto mankind’s actions in history, and which has had enormous reach ever since. According to this account, the Enlightenment as a whole (or the French Revolution, or modernity, or the West) has turned away from God and elevated humanity in His place, wrongly convinced that it could bring about the good autonomously and, instead, bringing about evil; Glucksmann, who applies this to contemporary terrorism, is but a recent teller of this tale. In fact, the traditionalist narrative has led to a number of misreadings of politics and art because it disregards the specificity and complexity of historical moments. It also has functioned to deflect attention from the

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extent to which religion and the reaction against modernity are themselves implicated in a number of resorts to terror. Nihilism and Terrorism in the Russian East Despite the assertions of Maistre and Schlegel, terrorism in Russia during the late nineteenth century had little to do with those who professed nihilism. Nihilism in the Russian context was originally a label for a philosophical position that was utilitarian, materialist, positivist, and scientific, and thus one that recognized no tradition, authority, or hierarchy. It was used first in 1829 by Nadezhdin, a Schellingian professor, to describe philosophical materialism (Billington 1970, 312). But it came to be applied to a cultural shift initiated by a certain generation of Russian intelligentsia that had come to value complete sincerity and turned against all convention, which it believed involved only superstition, manipulation, and hypocrisy. The “new men” of the 1860s criticized even the romantic sentimentality of the previous generation of progressives in the 1840s for its mere masking of the brutality in social relations. It was in Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons that the members of this generation were first identified as nihilists, and it was as the result of the reception of that novel that the connection between the materialist views of the nihilists and acts of terrorism was first asserted. Turgenev paints a portrait of one of the new men, Bazarov, calling him a nihilist, a person “who regards everything from the critical point of view” and “who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith” (Turgenev 1966, 17). Bazarov despises everything traditional and conventional, and mutters some things about the need for destruction in order to make a clean sweep. Valuing only what is practical, and, echoing Bentham, preferring chemistry to poetry, he has taken up the practical sciences and medicine. He is not shown to be politically active, finds himself thwarted in his aspirations to make a difference in the world, and by the end of the novel is on the way to becoming a country doctor. Russian nihilism is thus portrayed as more a stance of generational revolt than a program of political violence, and Turgenev treats Bazarov as someone with great personal authenticity and even heroism. But Fathers and Sons happened to be published just at the time of the outbreak of a number of mysterious fires in St. Petersburg, and people applied the novelist’s label of “nihilist” to those responsible for the violence—much to Turgenev’s displeasure, who found himself alienated from the younger generation as a result (Turgenev 1966, 170). The first proponents of terrorism in Russia were not nihilists per se, but anarchists such as Michael Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev, whose standpoint

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was somewhat different. According to Stephen Marks, in his How Russia Shaped the Modern World, “Their anarchism was a form of underground political warfare that battled to destroy the existing political-economic system and prepare the ground for a new egalitarian era in human existence” (Marks 2003, 7). Bakunin and Nechaev made their mark on future revolutionary organizations through their “Catechism of the Revolutionary,” written in 1868 (Bakunin and Nechaev 1974). The two radicals met in exile in Switzerland, and each persuaded the other that they were emissaries of largescale underground organizations, which in both cases was untrue (Laqueur 1977, 30). According to Marks, Bakunin’s revolutionary activity was displayed more in words than deeds, and the Catechism should be regarded as a prescriptive more than a descriptive document. Nevertheless, as the creed of systematic revolutionary violence, it helped direct the formation of subsequent radical organizations. At the same time, it confirmed the worst fears of conservatives concerning the Left’s intentions by making such proclamations as: “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests, no affairs, no feelings . . . not even a name” (303); he is an “implacable enemy of this world” (304); “he knows only one science, the science of destruction”; and “every day he must be prepared for death.” The Catechism enjoins the revolutionary to be without passion or pity, to manipulate those who are useful, and to kill those who are not. The true revolution will not attempt to salvage anything from tradition, but will clear the ground for a new beginning (308). Elsewhere, Bakunin uses highly spiritual terms to express his expectation that his program for revolution will help realize a cosmic plan by which Russia will save the world: through apocalyptic destruction there will emerge a “new heaven and new earth” (Bakunin 1973, 58). Let us, he proclaims in an infamous passage, “trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.” Nechaev was a particularly unscrupulous figure, who had managed to charm Bakunin, and he became the model for the character Peter Verkhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s novel. In the year following the writing of the Catechism, Nechaev returned to Russia from Europe, passing himself off as being the agent for a substantial revolutionary organization in Europe, the “Committee of the People’s Revenge.” He demanded total obedience from the members of the cell he was forming in Moscow, citing the authority of the (imaginary) secret central committee, and when one Ivanov challenged him, Nechaev had his small group of followers murder him. While the others were soon caught, Nechaev managed to escape to Geneva but was eventually deported back to Russia. Before that point, however, the rest of the group stood trial.

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Dostoyevsky followed the trial of Nechaev’s followers, whom he called the “Nechaevtzi,” with great interest, and decided to make the Nechaev case the basis of the novel he was then writing, which became The Possessed (Slonim 1959, 6). The true terrorists in Russia, the bomb-throwers who assassinated the czar, belonged to the next decade; that is, they were not men of the sixties whom Dostoyevsky criticizes in The Possessed, but of the seventies, the generation that was emerging in the period immediately following the novel’s publication. These were the Populists or narodniki, the lovers of the people. In the early 1870s, thousands of students left the cities and went out to the land to live in village communities in order to serve the peasants through teaching and providing medical care. These young people felt a need to provide some form of reparation for the old era of serfdom, which had recently passed, and they wanted to discover a social unity that would be the basis of a new Russia by overcoming the divisions between the educated and the unprivileged. They also believed that the peasants were the guardians of Russia’s national spirit and that their villages were organized according to authentic Russian communal principles (Figes 2002, 224). But the Populists’ attempts were doomed to failure as they discovered that the peasants were uncomprehending, fiercely loyal to the tsar, and often hostile. Many of the narodniki subsequently returned to the city to work with the emerging proletariat instead, but they found themselves the objects of brutal police oppression. In response to the hopelessness of their position, a number split off from the main organization to form the “People’s Will” in 1879. It was members of this group who undertook a series of assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, taking advantage of the principles of organization earlier formulated by Bakunin and Nechaev, and of the new technology of dynamite. The Populist terrorists were not, therefore, the same as the nihilists of the sixties—yet they were often called nihilists because the term had become the label for all types of radicals. In any case, they did not advocate destruction for its own sake, nor did they negate everything that was Russian, nor were they Westernizers, interested in learning from what was taking place or being thought in Europe. When the narodniki looked to the Europe of the nineteenth century, they saw class struggles, violent revolutions, terrible urban poverty, and gigantic machinery. The ideals, which they were trying to realize through establishing a close relation to the Russian people, were closer to Dostoyevsky’s own than they were to the utilitarian and scientific outlook of the nihilists he targets in his fiction. But the term nihilist became inseparable from that of terrorist in Russia and especially abroad. And then later, although the Bolsheviks were extreme Westernizers who distinguished themselves from all forms of nationalism, the Russian revolution confirmed to

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European conservatives the links between nihilism, terror, and the Russian soul (Bonnett 2004, 43). Thus, while nihilism in Russia was associated with radical Western ideologies such as Jacobinism, in Europe it was attributed to a certain Russian type of radicalism: characterized as Asiatic and ruthless, nihilism became an attribute of the Slavic, rather than the Westernized, intellectual. This style of culturalist or ethnocentric analysis is repeated today in many explanations for September 11. Islamic culture and/or the Arabic character have become the key to understanding current terrorism in the way that the Slavic soul was invoked earlier. Dostoyevsky’s Demons In The Possessed, it is a group of revolutionaries belonging to the generation of the sixties who are called nihilists by Dostoyevsky. They possess no common ideology, but rather display a range of theoretical positions. Yet the members of this group, living in a provincial town, systematically work to destabilize the social order by disrupting the relations between the classes, between the generations, and between the sexes, all of which culminate in arson and murder. Their leader, Peter Verkhovensky, decides to solidify the loyalty of his followers by having them participate in the killing of one of their number whom Peter has falsely accused of treachery, just as Nechaev did in real life. While The Possessed is evidently Dostoyevsky’s analysis of the causes and significance of the Nachaev conspiracy, in an issue of his Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky gives a more complex account of his intentions as an author. He did not try to recreate the actual Nechaev in Peter Verkhovensky. Instead, he writes, “I meant to put this question and to answer it as clearly as possible in the form of a novel: how, in our contemporaneous, transitional and peculiar society, are the Nechaievs, not Nechaiev himself made possible? And how does it happen that these Nechaievs eventually manage to enlist followers—the Nechaievtzi?” (Dostoyevsky 1971b, 142–43). Dostoyevsky goes on, “And in my novel The Possessed I made the attempt to depict the manifold and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in the perpetration of so monstrous a villainy.” This attempt was a deeply personal one, for Dostoyevsky claims that in his youth he himself had been on his way to becoming like one of the Nechaevtzi before he was arrested and imprisoned (147). Unlike his other fiction, Dostoyevsky wrote The Possessed with avowedly polemical intentions: it is what the Russians called a “tendentious novel.” He proclaims, in a letter in 1870, that “I want to speak out quite openly in this book with no ogling of the younger generation” (Dostoyevsky 1961, 211). Yet in the novel, he interprets the terrorizing activities of the nihilists as the

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inevitable outcome of the romantic idealism of the previous generation, that of the liberals of the forties, who unintentionally opened the door to terror by their modeling themselves upon Europeans and feeling contempt for the backwardness of Russia. Their successors, or “children,” were then “contaminated with the ideas of the then prevailing theoretical socialism” from Europe, which, when carried to St. Petersburg, seemed both moral and cosmopolitan (148). Their temptation lay in the lofty nature of the goals of universal progress and social regeneration, which, while often connected to Christianity, caused the rejection of the normal foundations of Russian society. The deracination of progressive intellectuals unexpectedly resulted in the “gloom and horror” of an act of murder represented as necessary for the great cause (149). In another letter, he seems to focus his condemnation on the younger generation, yet not completely: “Nihilism isn’t worth talking about. Only wait until this scum that has cut itself adrift from Russia, is quite playedout. And, do you know, I really think that many of the young scoundrels, decadent boys that they are, will sooner or later turn over a new leaf, and be metamorphosed into decent, thorough-going Russians? And the rest may go rot. But even they will finally hold their tongues, for sheer impotence” (192). In the novel, both these attitudes come out: at some points, Dostoyevsky treats the radicals with bitter satire, but in the end he shows most of them displaying a basic humanity that prevents them from behaving completely ruthlessly. Except for Peter, the nihilist conspirators turn out to be “decent, thorough-going Russians” after all. Contemporary representations of the characters in The Possessed thus tend to make them more “devilish” than does the author himself. Glucksmann, for example, claims that the nihilists in the novel “share one thing in common: the right to kill, to burn, to overturn, in order to achieve tabula rasa” (Glucksmann 2003, 1). And Andrew McKenna, in a 2002 paper called “Scandal, Resentment, Idolatry: The Underground Psychology of Terrorism,” writes that Dostoyevsky portrays “a whole provincial city . . . set ablaze amidst the romantic and nihilistic synergies befuddling its inhabitants” (McKenna 2002, 20). Both Glucksmann and McKenna therefore tremendously exaggerate both the motivations of the characters, which are much more mixed and less definitely destructive, and the extent to which terrorism actually occurs in the story. The political violence in the novel is limited to one act of arson in the suburbs, probably in any case set to cover up a murder, and the killing of one member of Peter Verkhovensky’s revolutionary group. The recent commentators’ extreme characterizations seem to be more derived from the principles outlined in Bakunin and Nechaev’s Catechism than they do from Dostoyevsky’s actual plot.

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The main character of The Possessed, insofar as his story begins and ends it, is Peter’s father, Stephen Verkhovensky, who, along with many of the others, can be regarded as personifying an aspect of Dostoyevsky himself. Here he is a double of the author as a representative of the generation of the forties. An ineffectual and vain pseudoscholar and freethinker, Mr. Verkhovensky is maintained by Mrs. Stavrogin, a local landowner who is trying to keep up to date with modern thought. He, in common with the rest of his generation, betrays the youth who are entrusted to him. Having spent his early years in Europe, a fact that is significant in itself, he abandons his infant son Peter to be brought up by distant relatives and subsequently robs him of property willed to him by his mother. This most unsuitable teacher is chosen by Mrs. Stavrogin to educate her son, Nicholas. As a result of the overblown romanticism of his opinions, his general neglect of his responsibilities, and his inappropriate familiarity with both Nicholas and Peter, both boys turn out to be monsters: Peter is full of contempt and cruel mischief, and Nicholas tries to compensate for his inability to feel deeply through dissipation and violence. In different ways, both “sons” are nihilists, representatives of the generation of the sixties: Peter is the Nechaev figure who claims to be the agent of a vast underground revolutionary organization. Despite his role in instigating both the murder and the arson, he is the only one of the group who escapes unscathed. Nicholas is the aristocratic radical, in many ways like Bakunin, but cold instead of passionate. He is both one of the elect and monstrous, “a bearer of [the intelligentsia’s] prophetic hopes” (Dostoyevsky 1971a, 421) and a great sinner who has committed terrible crimes. In the end of the novel, Nicholas kills himself, and he reveals in his suicide note that he has come to realize the nature of his, and his generation’s, situation. As Nicholas puts it, “He who loses his ties with his native soil loses his gods—that is, all his aims. One can go on arguing about anything forever, but from me nothing has come but negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Everything has always been petty and lifeless” (667). Mr. Verkhovensky, on the other hand, although he also dies at the end of the novel, is redeemable, belonging as he does to the older generation of romantics and liberals. As misguided and harmful as his actions have been, he has within him the capacity to love. On his deathbed, he comes to understand Russia through the parable in Luke’s gospel about the man possessed by devils. Jesus frees the man by casting his demons into a herd of swine; the swine become maddened, throw themselves off a cliff, and are drowned. Mr. Verkhovensky finds in this a parallel of the situation of Russia: the liberals of the forties, such as himself, and the nihilists of the sixties, such as Peter and Nicholas, are like the swine; they have taken into themselves all the devils which have possessed Russia, “our great and beloved invalid,” for centuries.

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This is all part of a higher plan for Russia’s ultimate purification and redemption. Mr. Verkhovensky prophesies, “We shall cast ourselves down, the raving and the possessed, from the cliff into the sea and shall all be drowned, and serves us right, for that is all we are good for. But the sick man will be healed and will sit at the feet of Jesus, and all will look at him and be amazed” (648). In this passage, it is clear that the nihilists are not themselves the demons, as is commonly claimed, but rather are those whom demons possess. Those who have lost their connection with the Russian soil and the Russian people by adopting foreign ideas and ways of life are dispossessed of their proper spirituality and thus open to possession by evil. Yet this evil does not prevail. The attempts by nihilists to destroy results only in futile selfdestruction; their passing, Mr. Verkhovensky is claiming, will ultimately free Russia so that it can at last be itself, and even, he suggests, be a light to others. Here, he gives voice to the opinion of the nationalist Slavophiles, one shared by Dostoyevsky, that Russia had a world destiny to surpass and guide the West, a civilization spiritually stunted and thus easily given over to corruption (Billington 1970, 317). Dostoyevsky’s Occidentalism If the demons are not the progressive intellectuals themselves but, instead, what possess them, then does Dostoyevsky think that they are Western ideas? In their 2004 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue that Dostoyevsky is blinded by his “Occidentalism,” an ideology made up of false and negative generalizations about the West. They write, “He is convinced that the West is committed to scientism, the belief that society can be engineered like the Crystal Palace. For him, imported scientism and utilitarianism constitute a dangerously deluded ideology. . . . We might share Dostoyevsky’s view of human behavior, but his view of the West as . . . driven by nothing but arid rationalism, is a dehumanizing Occidentalist distortion” (Buruma and Margalit 2004, 98). But this characterization of Dostoyevsky as being simply anti-Western, or of him believing that it is Western ideas that are the source of evil, does not really work. For Western culture is not something foreign or external to Dostoyevsky’s characters—it is written in their souls, to the extent that they experience themselves as being internally split. That is, the West has been absorbed by the Russians psychologically and it cannot be excised. In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky denies that it would be possible or even desirable to try to return to the way Russia was before the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. He senses that, while for two centuries, the intelligentsia had

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deserted Russia in their hearts, they are now returning; they have come back after their European sojourn neither as Europeans nor merely Russians, but as cosmopolitans comprehending both, and ready to further Russia’s worldhistorical mission. He argues that “under no circumstances can we renounce Europe. Europe is our second fatherland, and I am the first ardently to profess this; I have always professed this” (Dostoyevsky 1971b, 581). Thus it seems not to be ideas themselves, Western or not, that are the issue for Dostoyevsky. For he treats the problem of the evil actions committed by those who are not evil themselves as being not only a Russian problem, but one faced everywhere in a state of transition. He writes, “It has been so from time immemorial, during transitional epochs, at times of violent commotion in people’s lives—doubts, negations, skepticism and vacillation regarding the fundamental social convictions” (149). And, even though the Russian soul has been unmoored by the upheavals of the modern era, Dostoyevsky believes that it contains within itself a limit, an ultimate humility and a kernel of goodness that persists despite all the humiliations of history and degradations of crime; the recovery of that kernel will be the basis of a true socialism and the saving of the world. Those of his characters who attempt to act with infinite freedom (most famously Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) discover an inner limit. This is true of Nicholas Stavrogin, although he has been corrupted himself and has corrupted his followers: he recognizes himself both as being deracinated and as a soul seeking salvation. And it is true of his followers, who find themselves very unwilling to commit murder. The exception seems to be Peter Verkhovensky, who is closest in the novel to being truly devilish. In conclusion, I have argued that there is an often-repeated traditionalist narrative that tells how the loss of a higher frame of reference in modernity leads to terror, how humanism leads to self-destruction. Some contemporary commentators have found that Dostoyevsky convincingly demonstrates the linkage between godless materialism of Westernized culture and terroristic brutality, especially in The Possessed. This reading, given by some analysts of September 11, needs to be questioned on a number of levels. My main concern here has been to show that there has not been such an equivalence historically between terrorism and nihilism as is commonly asserted, and that although Dostoyevsky himself was a promulgator of this view to some extent, he does not give us a simple teaching even in his avowedly tendentious novel, The Possessed. The famous slogan “If God does not exist, nothing is forbidden” is not a sufficient summary of what he teaches in his fiction; it is often forgotten that it is a statement made by one character in The Brothers Karamazov and not necessarily in the voice of the author. And, although

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Dostoyevsky gives us a much more complex exploration of the roots of violence than the traditionalist narrative would recognize, this does not mean that we necessarily should trust his account either of Russian terrorism or nihilism. My own view is that Dostoyevsky had his own reasons—particularly a desire to repudiate his own radical past—for conflating the outlook of nihilism with the revolutionary anarchism of Bakunin and Nechaev. In fact, neither was directly responsible for the famous incidents of terrorism in Russia, which came out of a movement whose ideas were much closer to Dostoyevsky’s own. To make an obvious point here, artistic works do not have such a privileged access to truth that their representations, even of the periods in which they were written, can avoid being subject to critique. The arguments that The Possessed as well as the traditionalist narrative make about the causes of terror run up against the problem that so many terrorists, both then and now, have themselves been opposed to nihilism and have sought to return their societies to an absolute foundation. Modernity is considered by them to be corrupt, lacking foundations and meaning, and needing of purification by violence. Why read Dostoyevsky, then, if one wants to understand contemporary terrorism? Because his novels famously seek to uncover the most real: “deep penetration,” “from the real to the more real,” and the “restoration of everything immediate” were Dostoyevsky’s formulations (Billington 1970, 416), and his deep penetration of reality continues to be compelling to modern readers. He reveals “the manifold and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in the perpetration of so monstrous a villainy” (Dostoyevsky 1971b, 142–43), not the existence of a simple opposition between good and evil. Glucksmann and so many others miss the extent to which the author, in his portrayal of the “manifold and heterogeneous,” withholds a judgment concerning pure evil that they seem to desire. They also miss the extent to which his work does not support the focus on the category of the West for analysis. The West always tacitly involves a theory that deals in false oppositions such as that of the clash of civilizations, and thus it is unwelcoming to Dostoyevsky’s exploration of the intellectual’s experience of an inner spiritual split. The truth he wants to show to us lies in the common anxieties of societies undergoing cultural transition as they are played out in a number of relationships, such as in the estrangement between generations, and especially here between fathers and sons. In any case, if terrorism can be said to be either the product of the nonWest’s humiliation and weakness, or the outcome of the West’s nihilism, how much can the category really explain? If we believe that we can look to

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Dostoyevsky to help us uncover the roots of modern terror, then we should avoid using the West as a convenient name through which evil can be externalized and essentialized. References Bakunin, Michael. 1973. The reaction in Germany. In Michael Bakunin: Selected writings, ed. Authur Lehning, 58. Trans. Seven Cox and Olive Stevens. London: Jonathan Cape. Bakunin, Michael, and Sergei Nechaev. 1974. The catechism of the revolutionary. In Imperial Russia: A source book, 1700–1917, ed. B. Dmytryshyn, 350–55. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden. Bawer, Bruce. 2006. While Europe slept: How radical Islam is destroying the West from within. New York: Doubleday. Billington, James H. 1970. The icon and the axe: An interpretive history of Russian culture. New York: Vintage Books. Bonnett, Alastair. 2004. The idea of the West: Culture, politics and history. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. 2004. Occidentalism: The West in the eyes of its enemies. New York: Penguin. Carrier, James G., ed. 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon. Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich. 1989. What is to be done? Trans. M. R. Katz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2001. 9–11. New York: Seven Stories. di Giovanni, George. 2006. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/friedrich-jacobi/ (accessed May 15, 2006). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhail. 1971a. The devils. Trans. David Magarshack. New York: Penguin. ———. 1971b. The diary of a writer. Trans. B. Brasol. New York: Octagon Books. ———. 1961. Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his family and friends. Trans. E. C. Mayne. New York: Horizon. Eagleton, Terry. 2005. Holy terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Figes, Orlando. 2002. Natasha’s dance: A cultural history of Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books. Gill, Robin D. 2004. Orientalism and Occidentalism: Is the mistranslation of culture inevitable? Key Biscayne, FL: Paraverse. Glucksmann, André. 2003. Bin Laden, Dostoyevsky and the reality principle. Interview with Liss Gehlen and Jens Heisterkamp, March 31. OpenDemocracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1111.jsp (accessed April 2, 2003). ———. 2002. Dostoèievski á Manhattan. Paris: Laffont.

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Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. 1965. Kropotkin on the men of the sixties. In Russia and the West from Peter to Khrushchev, ed. L. J. Oliva, 123–25. Boston: Heath. Laqueur, Walter. 1977. Terrorism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Lewis, Bernard. 2001. The Revolt of Islam. New Yorker, November 19. ———. 1993. Islam and the West. New York: Oxford University Press. Marks, Steven G. 2003. How Russia shaped the modern world: From art to antiSemitism, ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McKenna, Andrew. 2002. Scandal, resentment, idolatry: The underground psychology of terrorism. Anthropoetics 8: 20–41. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism: Western representations of the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schlegel, Frederick von [Friedrich von]. 1883/1869. The philosophy of history, in a course of lectures delivered at Vienna. 7th ed., revised. Trans. J. B. Robertson. London: G. Bell & Sons. Slonim, Marc. 1959. Introduction to The possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, v–xvii. New York: Heritage. Turgenev, Ivan. 1966. Fathers and sons. Trans. Constance Garnett. Rev. and ed. Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 1966. Apropos of Fathers and sons. In Fathers and sons, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. and ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, 169–77. Originally published in David Magarshack, trans., Literary reminiscences and autobiographical fragments (New York: Farrar Straus & Cudahy, 1958). Viorst, Milton. 2006. Storm from the East: The struggle between the Arab world and the Christian West. New York: Modern Library.

CHAPTER 5

To This Side of Good and Evil Primo Levi as a Truth-teller Tuija Parvikko

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. —Arendt 1965, 232–33

F

or Hannah Arendt, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was a clear indication of a total collapse of the Western political tradition and its vocabulary. From World War II onwards, she repeatedly reflected on the question of how it was possible that even the analyses, made after the collapse of the Third Reich, failed to reach the heart of the matter, that is to say, failed to reach a political judgment on the mechanism of the birth and character of totalitarian power. Precisely as Arendt suggested, the problem at stake stems from the incapacity of Western political thought to deal with and analyze politically extreme events such as Nazi totalitarianism and the Holocaust. Our tradition of political thought does not provide us with a valid and accurate vocabulary with which it would be possible to seize the political aspect of these phenomena (Arendt 1994, 302). Instead, the analysis shifts to their historical, psychological, linguistic, philosophical, or juridical aspects (Agamben 1998, 7). Genocide is an act of terror. After 9/11, we easily tend to forget that, as such, it is not a new phenomenon. The case is rather that terror and terrorism often emerge unexpectedly in different contexts taking different modes of expression. This is why each case has to be read politically separately in

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order to understand its political meaning. In this chapter, the Nazi genocide is understood to be one of the most important contexts of political terror and terrorism in twentieth-century Europe. It is assumed that in order to understand the political meaning of “new terrorism” of the contemporary world, we need to understand the particular characteristics of earlier expressions of political terror. The lack of valid political vocabulary is most conspicuous when we try to talk about the survivors of the Nazi genocide. The vocabulary at our disposal is compelled to resort to the juridical tradition and its lexicon, talking about “testimony,” “witnessing,” and “witnesses,” as if the stories of survivors were merely testimonies given in the courtroom. Correspondingly, political judgment of the genocide is reduced to an ethical reflection on the nature of evil (on this huge literature see Felman and Laub 1992; Copjec 1996; Novick 1999; Bauer 2001; Todorov 2001). In this chapter, I claim that it is time to return from the “other side of good and evil” (Nietzsche) to “this side of good and evil” (Levi) to read politically Nazi totalitarianism, genocide, and the interpretations presented of them. I claim that the analogy with old and new terrorisms lies in the fact that terror and terrorism are always political phenomena and should be read and interpreted as such. Political reading of terrorisms means that the antiterrorist fight is not understood as a metaphysical war between good and evil, but rather is understood as a political fight between different political actors and their aims. In this context, I suggest that the survivors might be understood as Arendtian “truth-tellers” rather than juridical “witnesses.” In this way, it might be possible to understand survivors and other debaters of Nazi totalitarianism as “politicians,” who try to interfere and affect both the present day and the future by means of presenting interpretations and stories about past events. It might be possible to understand that “eye-witnesses” do not have a self-evident monopoly or primary position in the discussion and debate over the question of what kind of conclusions we should draw about Nazi totalitarianism and the unique political history of the twentieth century at large. Rather, a number of survivors may be understood as seekers of truth who are fighting against falling silent, evading truth, and lying in a world in which telling the truth has become a political action. In order to show that this shift is necessary, I will contribute to the debate about “witnessing the Holocaust” and “telling the story of the Holocaust” by discussing and analyzing two interesting and important interpretations of it. The first one is Hayden White’s thesis, according to which the Holocaust should be understood in Barthesian terms as a modernist event and, as such, its representation requires its own particular modes of expression. The second

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one is Giorgio Agamben’s thesis about the impossibility of integral testimony, which he postulates by means of a reinterpretation of Primo Levi’s reports about Auschwitz. I will argue, with Dominick LaCapra, that Agamben obscures and overtly dramatizes Levi’s simple remark according to which those who went through it all did not come back to tell about their experiences. This is precisely the knot we need to open by means of Arendt’s conception of the position and task of the truth-teller. A political truth-teller does not only proclaim individual experience promoting private interest, but also tries to call attention to a generally important issue, talk about which is not entirely based on his or her own experience and understanding the importance of which is not based on personal experience. Finally, I will suggest that both seeking and telling truth may become one of the most important modes of political action in the twenty-first century. The Holocaust as a Modernist Event According to Hayden White, the Holocaust is best understood as a modernist event. He suggests that the Holocaust is a unique event in that it cannot be told or represented by means of traditional modes of story-telling or historiography. It is an event whose nature permits it to serve as a paradigm of the kind of event about which we can be permitted to speak only in a literal manner (White 1999, 34). Consequently, the events of the Nazi genocide are intrinsically antirepresentational, which means that they are paradigmatic of the kind of event that can be spoken about only in a factual and literalist manner: the genocide consists of occurrences in which the very distinction between event and fact is dissolved (White 1999, 36). Following Berel Lang (1990), White invokes Roland Barthes’ notion of intransitive writing as a model for a position or a discourse appropriate to the discussion of the philosophical and theoretical issues raised by reflections on the Holocaust. Intransitive writing denies the distances between the writer, text, what is written about, and the reader: an author does not write in order to provide access to something independent of both author and reader, but writes himself. For the writer who writes himself, writing itself becomes the means of vision or comprehension, not a mirror of something independent, but an act and commitment—a doing or making rather than a reflection or description (White 1999, 37; Lang 1990, xii). Barthes points out that modern Indo-European languages offer only two possibilities for expressing the different kinds of relationships that an agent can be represented as bearing within an action, those of the active and the passive voices, while other languages, such as ancient Greek, offer a third

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possibility, that of a middle voice. Whereas in the active and passive voices, the subject of the verb is presumed to be external to the action (either agent or patient), in the middle voice, the subject is presumed to be interior to the action. Consequently, in literary modernism, the verb “to write” connotes neither an active nor a passive relationship but, rather, a middle one. In the modern verb of middle voice “to write,” the subject is constituted as immediately contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it (White 1999, 38). In White’s view, this difference indicates a new and distinctive way of imagining, describing, and conceptualizing the relationships obtaining between agents and acts, subjects and objects, a statement and its referent, the literal and figurative levels of speech, and therefore the factual and fictional discourse. Consequently, he suggests that the kind of anomalies, enigmas, and dead ends met with in the discussions of the representation of the Holocaust are the result of a conception of discourse that owes too much to a realism inadequate to represent events, such as the Holocaust, which are themselves modernist in nature (White 1999, 38–39). In White’s understanding, modernism appears as an anticipation of a new form of historical reality, a reality that includes supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects, such as the phenomena of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, and total war. White argues that all this suggests that modernist modes of representation may offer possibilities for representing the reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of realism could do. This demands that our notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be revised to take account experiences that are unique to our century and for which the older modes of representation have proven to be inadequate (White 1999, 41–42). If This Is a Man Primo Levi’s (1919–87) first book, If This is a Man (first published in 1947), is an account of his deportation and captivity at Monowitz-Buna that lasted ten months until the arrival of the Russians, on January 27, 1945. The seventeen chapters of the book deal with certain themes and aspects of the camp life “in the order of urgency” (Levi 1979, 16; 1958). Breaking with the traditional use of chronology is one of the special characteristics of the text, which suggests that it might be best understood as a case of intransitive writing. Levi’s text differs from standard storytelling, at least in the following ways. Breaking the chronology is intensified by playing with tempi and moods that is probably possible only in Italian and very difficult, if not impossible, to translate into

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other languages. In terms of this level of play, Levi is able to manipulate the distance of the writing voice and the reading eyes from the text. At times, both the writer and the reader are immersed among the inmates of the camp and their surrealist life, while at other times, Levi intentionally draws himself, together with the reader, further away from this “anti-world” and its absurdities in order to look at it from afar. Levi’s way of using the present tense has been described “absolute” (Sossi 1998, 175) as far as it succeeds in blurring the temporal (and perhaps also spatial) distance between the writer and the reader. Levi uses also other ways of breaking with traditional storytelling, such as departing from the normal structure of sentences, the extensive usage of the passive voice or a generic “we” when referring to the camp inmates, blurring both the author of the text and the agent of actions so that the events seem to take place without any clear initiative or active impact of anybody or any normal human logic of behavior whatsoever. In addition, there is a specific aspect in the text that is related to the past and the present, that is, to memory and history. This aspect challenges the widely shared interpretation, according to which the collapse of the Third Reich was followed by a period of “collective amnesia” during which people did not want to think and remember what had taken place in Europe during the twelve years of the Nazi empire (Wieviorka 1999; Traverso 2004). In the chapter entitled Our Nights, Levi describes the collective dreams of the inmates of the camp, challenging a “realistic” approach to remembering and forgetting and suggesting that also in this respect the surrealism of the camp succeeded in breaking the “normal” way of shaping the past, present, and future, and the distinction between real and imaginary. Levi writes, “This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me. . . . It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word” (1979, 66). This is, indeed, a dream and not a description of a postwar situation at home. It caused embarrassment in Levi’s mind. He continues, “I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story” (66). In other texts (see Levi 1997), Levi has reported that the reluctance of the family members and people in general to listen to stories of survivors was a

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simple fact and a widespread phenomenon in the postwar European reality. However, the earlier quote suggests that the conception of postwar silence might partly be a product of a specific mental confusion, frustration, and trauma born during the period spent in the camp. It suggests that the “world” of the camp was so surrealist and extreme that the inmates started to fear that nobody would listen and believe them if they ever had an opportunity to tell about what they had gone through. In the postwar experience of the survivor it may have seemed that nobody wanted to listen, while from the viewpoint of other people the survivors easily appeared as an annoyance that did not want to return to normal life but preferred to go on repeating their depressing horror stories. However, despite all the intransitive aspects of Levi’s text, it cannot exclusively be described as an expression of the middle voice. Rather, intransitivity is one of the textual strategies used by Levi in order to write as “authentic” an account as possible and to express and give testimony of the camp experience as well as possible. It is difficult to say how consciously Levi adopted intransitive aspects in his writing strategy. In his own words he aimed for objectivity and for an “ethnographic” style. His narrative is conspicuously reduced and simple and precisely these characteristics become emphasized when he deals with (anti)ethical and (anti)political aspects of the camp. However, it is especially in two chapters—“This Side of Good and Evil” and “The Drowned and the Saved”—that Levi crosses the border of intransitive writing and hindsight assessment or judgment. The former is a description of trade and stealing—grey markets—among the inmates. Everything possible was for sale and everything possible could be stolen: in order to survive, one had to accommodate oneself to these practices. Things, deeds, and people were exclusively evaluated as “things,” that is, on the basis of their capacity to contribute to the possibility of survival. In this sense, the camp life did not follow any “normal” or conventional ethical patterns or rules of moral conduct. Neither did it follow any conventional conceptions of crime and punishment. Consequently, Levi challenges the reader to consider whether the camp life can be assessed and judged according to conventional conceptions of good and evil or just and unjust (Levi 1979, 92). “This side” (al di qua) of the title of the chapter refers to being inside the camp, inside the barbed-wire fence: there, Levi suggests, the normal morality of human interaction collapses. People’s conduct doesn’t follow normal moral or ethical patterns but “actions” and “choices” are guided by the principle of survival. One of the reasons for this is that in the camp it is impossible to shape causal relations between deeds and events. The punishments do not fit the crimes and one may be punished without having done anything.

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Consequently, the entire camp experience cannot be told as a “normal story” with a plot. Things forbidden were not forbidden for some particular reason but because everything was forbidden (Levi 1979, 35). As distinguished from the general purpose of the camp—that of the destruction of inmates—the life of an inmate in the camp is characterized by the lack of decipherable explanations or reasons. The days are filled with purposeless, repetitive events occurring without protagonists and “whys” that would relate the events to each other in such a way that emplotment would be possible. Politically, the camp can be characterized as a space without action, a space in which contingency has been replaced by a kind of randomness in an almost absolute sense. In other words, an inmate of the camp does not politick with contingency or jump at the chance in the ordinary sense of these conceptions but his or her doings are rather guided by random or haphazard attempts to stay alive. This is reflected particularly well in the fate of those inmates who did try to politick in/with the extreme situation of the camp. The Kapos, black market merchants, and other profiteers of the camp world were no more able to avoid the gas chamber than ordinary inmates. Speaking in Their Stead While If This is a Man was written in the urgency felt by a survivor to tell and transmit his experience immediately after the war, The Drowned and the Saved is an account and judgment made with the hindsight of forty years. There is no trace of intransitive writing left in it; it is rather informed by a cool, calm, and perhaps even melancholy deliberation and evaluation. This is well reflected also in the contents and structure of the book. Levi no longer imagines that he is able to give an “integral” testimony, and is, at the same time, very conscious of the unreliability of memory itself (Levi 1988, 21). After the success of his first book, Levi became a kind of permanent witness spending a significant part of his life giving interviews and writing articles related to his own experience and to the Nazi genocide in general. It is understandable that his stance to it changed in the course of time and that a desire was born to give a new testimony and judgment based on “secondary memory”1 and deliberation. This change is related in large part to the questions of witnessing, remembering, and memory. Levi also points out—as a kind of reverse side of the unreliability of memory—that the passing of time brings along with it a certain decantation, which means that historical facts can be seen in perspective only with the hindsight of a few decades (1986, 10).

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Levi’s basic conviction, according to which it is our ethical and political duty to tell and transmit the history of Nazi genocide, has not changed. He believes that it is even easier to tell the whole story with the hindsight of a few decades as the amount of general historical knowledge has grown. What has changed, instead, is his understanding of the capacity of the survivor-victim to bear witness and transmit his or her experience. Related to this is also Levi’s understanding that the position of the survivor has changed: 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, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. 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 the 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. (1988, 63–64)

Indeed, the complete, “integral” witnesses, those who went through all the phases of destruction, did not come back to tell their story and experience. Levi writes, “We who were favored by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate, but also that of the 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. . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy” (23). There are two major points that Levi makes. On the one hand, he claims that an average inmate of the camp is not necessarily the best possible witness because, more often than not, it was impossible for him or her to shape the entirety of the camp and the Nazi genocide. A huge number of victims did not know where they were and what was going to happen to them. This general ignorance transformed into a kind of illiteracy as to the entirety of the phenomenon that was taking place. On the other hand, Levi points out that those who would be capable of telling the entire experience of the process of destruction are not able to do so because they are dead. One of the most difficult aspects of understanding the phenomenon of the camp has been the collapse of “normal” or conventional ethical and moral patterns of behavior that took place there. It has been difficult to accept that the inmates were not simply innocent victims of evil perpetrators. Levi points out that the world into which one entered was not only terrible but also indecipherable. It did not conform to any model of war, hostilities, or fighting,

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because in the camp the enemy was not only surrounding the inmates but also inside them: the “we” lost its limits. One could not discern any frontier between friends and enemies, but instead, there were many confused frontiers (1986, 25). Levi argues that in order to understand how the camp really worked, we should focus our attention on the analysis of a complex system of privileges that the Nazis organized in the camps. Consequently, the Lager can be considered an excellent laboratory of privileges as far the hybrid class of prisonerfunctionaries constitutes its armature. It is the grey zone, with ill-defined outlines that both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants (1986, 27). Levi divides the privileged into three categories. First, there are the lowranking functionaries that “formed a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle washers, night-watchmen, bed smoothers . . . checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, interpreters, assistants’ assistants” (1988, 29). Generally speaking, they were poor devils like simple prisoners (1986, 31). Second, there were those who occupied commanding positions, the Kapos. These were the chiefs of the labor squads, the barracks chiefs, the clerks, the prisoners who performed diverse duties in the camps’ administrative offices. Most of these were persons who proved to be human specimens ranging from the mediocre to the execrable (32–33). It is the third group, the Sonderkommando, that has puzzled both the survivor-witnesses, like Levi, and other people the most. With the term Sonderkommando, the SS referred to the group of prisoners who were entrusted with running the crematoria. Levi argues that conceiving and organizing of these squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime because it was precisely this institution that represented an attempt to shift on to others, specifically on to the victims, the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived even the solace of innocence (1986, 36). Giorgio Agamben and Levi’s Paradox Mesnard and Saletti (2002, 28–29) argue that Levi ends up in racking aporia. What remains is an irreducible opposition between the status of one who was “saved,” and who is able to bear witness, and one who “drowned,” who does not have a voice even through survivors. In other words, survivors are not able to give integral testimonies because they did not see the Gorgon. Consequently, the absolute experience of the camp is destined to remain without a voice because real integral witnesses would be the inmates known as “Muslims,”2 who remained without a voice even before their physical

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death. Giorgio Agamben has come to a similar conclusion calling this aporia Levi’s paradox. For Agamben,3 the real problem lies in the gaps between the witness, testimony, and receiver of the message. In his view, the testimony essentially contains a hole that derives from the fact that survivors bear witness to something that cannot be witnessed. This something is the experience of death: those who have seen the Gorgon lose their voice already before definitively losing their physical vigor, being unable to tell what they have seen and experienced. An ideal “integral witness” can be postulated theoretically: he is the “Muslim” who has seen the Gorgon. The problem is that the “Muslim” is not able to bear witness, testify to what he or she has seen and experienced, but the survivors have to do it in his or her stead. The consequence is an unfulfilled hole between the witness and that of which he or she wants to tell and testify. Agamben’s thesis is problematic in the way it understands the relation between Auschwitz and life and death, and consequently ends up mystifying and mythologizing Auschwitz. It can be argued that the impossibility of looking at the Gorgon is related not only to extermination camps but to fundamental conditions of human life in general: the boundary between life and death can be crossed only once and nobody comes back to tell us about his or her experience of death. However, it has to be taken into account that Agamben’s idea can be fully understood only in relation to his general thesis regarding the state of exception, within the frame of which the extermination camp is a place where the borderline between life and death is blurred. In this environment, the “Muslim” paradigmatically represents living dead figures (as the Nazis called them) that have left the realm of life behind but have not yet fully died. However, other inmates of the camp are destined to step outside the normal realm of life, outside good and evil. The extermination camp is a nonplace, where the inmates have ended up by the order of the sovereign who decides on matters of life and death. It is a place in which no normal ethical values and norms are in force or valid. Human and inhuman are blended with each other and both prisoners and warders can act in a completely unpredictable way. In Agamben’s interpretation, the blurring of all kinds of boundaries is emphasized. By blurring boundaries between good and evil, and between life and death, the extermination camp blurs also the boundary between that which is human and inhuman. The “Muslim” is no longer a human being in the proper sense of the word. A careful reading of Agamben’s text quickly reveals that his interpretation of Levi is based on two authorities, Arendt and Schmitt. A comparison with

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Arendt’s analysis of a concentration camp, which she presented in the last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, reveals a conspicuous uniformity between these two interpretations. Agamben not only represents Arendt’s notion of the obsoleteness of the Western political vocabulary but also her notion of blurring boundaries between human and inhuman and between victim and executioner (1979, 453). The result is a notion of the camp as an ethically ambivalent area that cannot be analyzed politically in terms of the existing vocabulary. If one combines Schmitt’s thesis of the state of exception with this notion, one gets the Agambenian frame of analysis. As regards Primo Levi, the problem is that his texts cannot necessarily be understood in a Schmittian or Arendtian spirit. Instead of blurring boundaries and differences between victims and executioners, Levi emphasizes that although internal frontiers and borderlines of ethically ambivalent grey zone are manifold, victims remain victims and executioners remain executioners. This basic fact should never be forgotten. Levi’s central thesis, rather, is that although the actions and deeds of the inmates of the camps should not be judged in black-and-white terms, we still should continue our efforts to reach better and more accurate assessments of them. More importantly, he was one of the first who manage to reach a perspective of judgment that is free from moral disapproval and disgust, as well as being able to distinguish between ethical and political judgments or evaluations, on the one hand, and juridical verdicts, on the other. He suggests that especially in extreme cases, such as the Sonderkommando, we should be careful not to turn ethical and political consideration into a juridical verdict (1988, 43; Traverso 2004, 185–86). Hence, I will argue that Levi by no means suggests that the extermination camp is a nonplace on the other side of good and evil, but rather that it is an ethically multidimensional and multileveled place on this side of good and evil (al di qua del bene e del male). This language game with the title of Nietzsche’s book is decisive in understanding what Levi means. First, being on this side of good and evil refers to being inside the barbed wire fence of the extermination camp. Second, “being on this side” also refers to the fact that the extermination camp is not situated outside of the human world, even if it may seem so at first glance. We should not surrender to the Nazis and their efforts at dehumanization, but continue to think of the inmates of the ˘ zek 2001, 77). camps as human beings, because that is what they were (Zi˘ Indeed, Levi’s reply to the question of “if this is a man” is as follows: yes, this is a man, too. In other words, despite its extreme and specific character, the camp belongs to the sphere of human action and, as such, it is to be judged ethically and politically. However, because of its ethical multileveledness—due to

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the complicated nature of the relations between victims and executioners—it cannot be judged in traditional black-and-white terms by classifying people and their deeds as either good or evil. From all this it follows that that which Agamben understands as being Levi’s paradox is not a paradox at all. Rather, what is actually at stake here are certain characteristics and conditions of the human world and people living in it that inevitably shape our lives as human beings. In other words, there is nothing paradoxical in the fact that survivors did not see the Gorgon and cannot bear witness to the experience of those who did see her. Agamben’s interpretation of Levi is meant to support and clarify his own thesis, or rather, to give a warning, concerned with the character of biopolitics in the twentieth and twenty-first century. For Agamben, the present biopolitics is not simply about the sovereign’s decision on matters of life and death. What is at stake in the present politics is survival itself. The aim of the present biopolitics is no longer merely to decide on who can live and who must die but rather to produce an existence that can be completely formulated and manipulated. In this context, the “Muslim” appears as a kind of figure who is not able to offer any resistance. Agamben suggests that we may be approaching a point in which we all will be transformed into “Muslims.” Dominick LaCapra does not accept this point of view. He admits that for Levi, as a survivor, to say that it is not he but the “Muslim” who is the true witness, is an acceptable hyperbole, while for Agamben to identify with Levi and hence speak for him and the “Muslim” may be hyperbolic in an objectionable sense (LaCapra 2004, 185). LaCapra suggests that writing from within the limit situation or the state of exception in which the “Muslim” is everyman—where Auschwitz is now seen to be everywhere, and the exception becomes the rule—is in a sense to write in extremis, as if each moment were the moment of death. Consequently, the present Agambenian philosophy becomes a postapocalyptic, post-Auschwitz perspective of conceptual and ethical meltdown, or a radical blurring of distinctions, wherein the threshold of indistinction, the grey zone, and the rampant state of exception seem fully to meld (2004, 191). As far as I can see, LaCapra wants to suggest that Agamben’s approach eludes any political analysis of the camp and its political “message” for the present-day world, despite the fact that he emphasizes the urgency of this kind of analysis. Agamben is satisfied with a macro-level assessment typical in philosophy. He gets stuck in an analysis of ethical-juridical vocabulary and etymological observations, without being able to outline a new political vocabulary, despite his claim that there is a desperate need for it.

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Although we may reject Agamben’s vision of a world in which all human life is reduced to a “Muslim”-like existence, we may nevertheless accept a scenario, according to which political action in the twenty-first century may become the struggle for remembering, history, and maintaining a sense of reality (Levi 1986, 20; Todorov 2001, 139–45). As the motto of this article shows, Hannah Arendt never believed that all the testimonies could be destroyed, and that there will always be someone left alive to tell the story. In the present context, it may indeed be useful to recall what Hannah Arendt wrote about truth and politics and consider how it might help us to outline possibilities for political action in the twenty-first century. The Truth-teller as Politician Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order. Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world. —Arendt 1968, 251

Following Arendt, it may be argued that the significance of lying and telling the truth has changed in the present-day world. While the traditional political lie concerned true secrets or intentions, the modern political lie deals with things that are not secrets at all but rather well-known to everybody (for an extended treatment of this distinction, see O. Guaraldo in this volume). The purpose of the traditional political lie was not to deceive everybody, but rather, it was directed at and meant to deceive only the political enemy. It made a hole in the fabric of factuality but did not destroy the entire fabric, that is, reality. The modern political lie replaces reality with an image, which its makers themselves begin to believe. The border between reality and fabricated images begins to blur and finally hardly anyone even tries to tell the truth (1968, 252–53). Lying does not lead to the substitution of truth by something else; it leads, rather, to living in a permanent lie and self-deception. It is in this situation that the truth-teller steps on the scene. Arendt argues that to look upon politics from the perspective of truth means to take one’s stand outside the political realm. This standpoint is the standpoint of the truth-teller.

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Arendt wanted to distinguish between a politician who acts in the public realm and the truth-teller (or the fact-finder, the witness, the reporter) who tells or says what is the case. Although it may be difficult, if not impossible, to take this kind of stance in an absolute sense in the present-day world, there are at least two points in Arendt’s text that deserve to be taken seriously, even today. First, telling what is the case still requires critical distance in the sense of keeping a distance from collective self-deception and political expediency: it is possible to break collective self-deception and a fabric of lies only if one does not believe “truths” and necessities told and kept up by others. Second, even though truth telling in Arendtian terms takes place outside of the political realm, it still has political significance. Arendt writes, “The political function of the storyteller—historian or novelist—is to teach acceptance of things as they are. Out of this acceptance, which can also be called truthfulness, arises the faculty of judgment” (1968, 261–62). One may ask whether Primo Levi ever wanted to “teach acceptance of things as they are.” However, if one carefully reads the quote, Arendt’s argument becomes clearer. She speaks of acceptance as truthfulness, meaning that it is not the task of the truth-teller to manipulate facts and fabricate new facts but simply to tell “what is” or what has taken place. It is the task of the readers, then, to judge these events and decide about their political meaning. This is precisely how Primo Levi understood his position and task. For Arendt, the reconciliation with what has taken place does not mean leaving things as they are. On the contrary, the reconciliation with unjust events of the past means taking political responsibility for them. With respect to Auschwitz, this means that “accepting” the fact that the genocide took place means taking responsibility not for the atrocities themselves but for what happens after them (Moscati 2006, 107–8). In this context, the task of a truth-teller like Primo Levi is to tell what happened so that we—“the rest”—can take political responsibility for what will happen now and in the future. I argue that the position and task of the truth-teller has been politicized more than either Arendt or Levi was able to see or admit. I argue that in the present-day world characterized by enormous political lies, self-deception, and new terrorism the truth-teller becomes a politician. More precisely, mere seeking and revealing of truth becomes political action in a world in which the exercise of power has been organized into a web of lies and in which the prevailing mode of protest seems to be an act of terror. Unlike the “normal situation,” in which telling the truth remains apolitical, insofar as it does not put anything new in motion, in the present-day world telling the truth often

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changes our understanding of the world and our possibilities of judging that which is taking place. Although, in the present situation, it is easy to find signs of the Agambenian state of exception becoming more and increasingly true every day, it is equally easy to find support for the Arendtian optimism, according to which somebody will always remain alive to tell the story. The attempt of the Nazis to hide the traces of mass extermination never succeeded. It may be argued that hardly any political crime or act of terror in the history of humankind has left so many traces and stories, on the basis of which we can judge it. In conclusion, the time of truth telling is not over. On the contrary, I would like to suggest that seeking and telling the truth may become one of the most important modes of political action in the twenty-first century. The struggle for truth, memory, and history may put in motion something new that may help us to weave a new web of reality—the common world between people—in place of the present fabric of images. References Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. ———. 1998. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Arendt, Hannah. 1953/1994. Mankind and terror. In Essays in understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, 297–306. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1951/1979. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich. ———. 1968. Truth and politics. In Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought, 227–64. New York: Viking. ———. 1963/1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Viking. Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Copjec, Joan, ed. 1996. Radical evil. London: Verso. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crisis of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge. Lang, Berel. 1990. Act and idea in the Nazi genocide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. Approaching limit events: Siting Agamben. In History in transit: experience, identity, critical theory, 99–119. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1998. History and memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Levi, Primo. 1997. Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1988. The drowned and the saved. London: Michael Joseph. ———. 1986. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1979. If this is a man/The truce. London: Penguin.

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———. 1976. Appendice a “Se questo è un uomo.” In Se questo è un uomo, 327–50. Edizione scolastica. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1947/1958. Se questo è un uomo. Torino: Einaudi. Moscati, Antonella. 2006. “Non sarebbe dovuto accadere.” Dal male radicale al male banale. In Shoah. Percorsi della memoria, ed. Clemens-Carl Härle, 99–125. Napoli: Cronopio. Mesnard, Philippe, and Carlo Saletti. 2002. Introduction to Sonderkommando. Diario di un crematorio di Auschwitz, 1944, by Salmen Gradowski, 7–47. Venezia: Marsilio. Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sossi, Federica. 1997. Nel crepaccio del tempo. Testimoniare la Shoah. Milano: Marcos y Marcos. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2000/2001. Memoria del male, tentazione del bene. Inchiesta su un secolo tragico. Bologna: Garanzi. Traverso, Enzo. 2004. Auschwitz e gli intellettuali. La Shoah nella cultura del dopoguerra. Bologna: Il Mulino. White, Hayden. 1992/1999. Historical emplotment and the problem of truth in historical Representation. In Figural realism: Studies in the mimesis effect, 27–42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 1998/1999. L’era del testimone. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Z˘i˘zek, Slavoj. 2001. Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion. London: Verso.

Notes 1. Dominick LaCapra (1998, 20–21) distinguishes between primary and secondary memory. The former refers to immediate memories of events by the person who has experienced them, while the latter refers to the critical working through and adding to primary memory by information acquired later and elsewhere. 2. In the jargon of the inmates of Auschwitz, “Muslims” (Muselmänner) referred to exhausted and weak prisoners who had lost their strength and will to fight for survival. They were doomed to death either by selection or general weakness. 3. In this section, I introduce and summarize the theses presented in Agamben 1998 and 2003, which is why I do not give specific page numbers.

CHAPTER 6

Narrating the Trauma Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance Kuisma Korhonen

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t first sight, George Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) is a hybrid book of fiction and nonfiction, where every odd-numbered chapter is fiction, and every even-numbered one is autobiography. However, on a closer look, it becomes evident that both stories are linked to a real historical event: to the disappearance of the author’s mother in Auschwitz. The book may serve, then, as a kind of test case in order to analyze the difference between two different genres, autobiography and fiction, and between the two different modes of truth that they evoke. Autobiography, as a testimony to one’s own life, is usually read against the expectations of honesty and truthfulness, the author being the ultimate witness of its topic. Fiction, on the other hand, is read as being independent from truth-value in the sense of correspondence between signs and referents: fiction may use real or invented events (for example, autobiographical events), but the real significance of the story—its “truthfulness” in a larger sense—is not dependent on any direct relationship between the narrated events and real life, but rather on the possibilities it offers to the reader to identify with or take distance from some perspectives in the text. As I will argue in this paper, the relationship between the two modes might be much more complicated than we usually think: fiction may very well give us, the readers, access to a deeper level of reality than nonfiction.

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Identification in Holocaust Testimonies In his recent book, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Robert Eaglestone argues that what marks Holocaust testimonies, and perhaps forces us to read them as belonging to a genre of their own, apart from fiction, is their rejection of identification: Where fiction utilizes, not exclusively but largely, the process of identification, the genre of testimony both in its texts and—this is a crucial step—in the basis for interpreting and reading those texts rejects identification. . . . The difference between testimony and fiction is at this very basic level. The attempt by testimony texts to refuse the very strong and often taken-for-granted power of identification is a key ‘nuts and bolts’ part of the ‘strangeness’ of testimony that Felman and Laub highlight. The genre prohibits readings that identify and so consume the testimonies and this generic prohibition is how, following Levi, a ‘dyke’ is erected against this, even though it is often broken. (2004, 38–39)

Why is identification so central to fiction, and why does testimony, according to Eaglestone, reject it? Or does it reject it? Diana Fuss writes in her Identification Papers, “Identification is the psychical mechanism that produces self-recognition. Identification inhabits, organizes, and instantiates identity. It operates as a mark of self-difference, opening up a space for the self to relate to itself as a self, as a self that is perpetually other” (1995, 2). Without some kind of identification, there is no identity. We form our self-image only in continuous reflection between the same and the other, in encounters where we both project our inside outside and incorporate the outside as part of our inside. By identifying with fictive characters, we both project our own properties to them and incorporate them as models for our own self-understanding. For critics like Martha Nussbaum (1990), it is exactly the possibility of identification that makes literature ethically valuable: the possibility of adopting another person’s viewpoint makes us more sensitive to other people’s pain. So, why do testimonies reject identification, as Eaglestone claims? One feels tempted to refer here first to the different status between the “truth” in fiction and the “truth” in historiography that Kalle Pihlainen (2006) has recently discussed. “Fictional truth,” to use the term of Riffaterre (1990), is linked to the reader’s experiences about the “truthfulness” of the text, using as a reference rather his or her own experiences of the world than any verifiable source outside the text. Reading a fictional account of a failed love affair, for example, the reader may think, “Oh yes, she feels and acts just like I did when my lover left me, this is so true.” In order to reach the moment of truthfulness of experience, therefore, fiction has to create narrative techniques like

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focalization that draw the reader inside the text, so that he or she can identify, at least temporarily and playfully, with some position or perspective in the text and thus evaluate how convincing that position or perspective is. In historiography, unlike in fiction, the reference is outside the text and the reader, in the world of textual documents like archives, testimonies, and other historical studies that help us to construct a narrative about singular events that have taken place in verifiable time and place. Therefore, in historiography there is, in principle, no need to use focalization or other narrative devices encouraging reader identification: the reader evaluates the truth-value of the text from its relation to its outside. In textual practice, however, the difference between fiction and history is often far from absolute—as Hayden White has argued (1978, 1987), historical studies often do use similar rhetorical strategies as fiction: they are not just objective reports about “what really happened,” but attempts to persuade the reader about the validity of a certain perspective and interpretation of the events. Moreover, can we really apply the distinction between fictional and historical narratives to testimonies, even in principle? As Jacques Derrida has noted, is not the very point of witnessing exactly that the witness can refer only to his or her own experience, his or her own memories—in other words, to something that is no longer present, neither to the audience nor to the witness him- or herself (2005, 31–32)? Or, as Paul Celan put it, “No one/bears witness for the/witness” (1971, 240).1 Testimony defines itself as being the opposite to fiction, but simultaneously, it must include the possibility of a lie, or fiction, in itself in order to be testimony: if there is some definitive proof that excludes this possibility, there is no longer need for testimony (Derrida 1996, 23). In cases where we really need a witness—when there are no other records available of the event, when the witness is the only source we have— we cannot take an objective stand. Testimony relies on an act of faith: we must choose whether we believe the witness or not. We cannot stay outside the testimony and compare its argument to some sources outside itself; instead, we must try to adopt the perspective of the speaker, at least temporarily, and see if this perspective is, in itself, persuasive enough. But it is here that the real problem lies: can we step inside a Holocaust testimony? We can here refer to Dori Laub’s provocative statement that “there was . . . historically no witness to the Holocaust, either from outside or from inside the event”—a statement that refers to the brutal destruction of human value and therefore also to the destruction of the possibility for genuine human relations. Laub writes, “There was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject, of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the

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possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another. But when one cannot turn to a ‘you’ one cannot say ‘thou’ even to oneself. The Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself ” (1992, 82). The resistance to identification in the case of testimony is thus essentially different from the virtual lack of identification in historiography. The only appeal that a testimony has is a plea: please, come here, listen, share this experience with me, believe me! However, it is this possibility of addressing the reader, the possibility of sharing, even the very possibility of witnessing itself that is called into question by the experience of the Holocaust. The reader cannot identify with the survivor because the survivor cannot identify with him- or herself and no longer has any positive identity that one could identify with. There is no stable standpoint, no narrative continuity that could make sense as the “narrative identity,” the Ricoeurian ipse. It seems to be, indeed, the case that many Holocaust testimonies do resist the kind of easy and pleasurable identification that takes place, for example, in reading romantic novels. There is, as Shoshona Felman has put it, genuine strangeness in many Holocaust testimonies that disturb our reading practices (Felman 1992, 7). Eaglestone lists some typical textual features that many Holocaust testimonies share and that seem to interrupt the processes of easy and automatic identification. These include, for example, temporal and logical gaps, shifts, and breaks in narrative; different metanarrative frames that remind the reader of the reality of the testimonial act; the sheer unbearability of narrated events; allegories of failed understanding that underline the impossibility of comprehending the event; lack of narrative closure; and sometimes overidentification that Eaglestone takes, paradoxically, as proving the ultimate impossibility of positive identification. These features are most visible in some modernist texts like in Paul Celan’s poetry, but according to Eaglestone, one can discern them also in many seemingly realistic testimonies of the Holocaust (2004, 42–71). Not only is it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for us to imagine the extreme experiences of terror that Holocaust victims and survivors went through, many Holocaust witnesses in fact state overtly that we should not even try to appropriate their experiences and imagine them as resembling something even remotely familiar to us. Some commentators like George Steiner or Berel Lang (1990) have even felt that all attempts to represent the horrors of Holocaust victims are inevitably doomed to fail. The horror was too extreme, too vast to be represented in any meaningful way—and, so the argument goes, thus all Holocaust fictions that display the events as redemptive stories of protagonists that we can easily identify with (like,

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according to many critics, Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List does) are ethically dubious. Violence of Identification According to the Levinasian ethics that is the starting point for Eaglestone, identification betrays a “metaphysics of comprehension” that can be understood “as both the desire for and the methods by and through which Western thought, in many different ways, comprehends, seizes, or consumes what is other to it and so reduces the other to itself, to the same” (2004, 4). By identification, we refuse to welcome the other as truly other; instead, we incorporate the other into a modality of the same, into something familiar and subordinate to our will.2 There is always an element of violent mastery and possession in identification. As Diana Fuss states, “Identification operates on one level as an endless process of violent negation, a process of killing off the other in fantasy in order to usurp the other’s place, the place where the subject desires to be” (1995, 9). The popularity of Holocaust literature and movies may tell us not only about our need to understand and learn from the historical events, but also about our secret and not-so-innocent desire to identify with the victims and thus appropriate the uncanny event as something that we can control and even enjoy in our fantasies. In some extreme cases, identification with victims has produced the phenomenon of false testimonies, like Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996), the fraud testimony of a Holocaust childhood in the camps. In this particular case, it is difficult to tell whether Wilkomirski’s book is a result of its author’s pathological identification or a carefully calculated attempt to manipulate the readers’ pathological identification with the victims. The impossibility for others to understand becomes clear also in Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness (2004), although from a different point of view: when the young survivor returns to Budapest from Buchenwald, many people pity him for the hell he must have gone through, but are not able to believe—just as we, the readers, are probably not able to believe, either— that the young boy actually took life in the camps as more or less banal, everyday routine, or even experienced moments of happiness in Auschwitz, as the narrator provocatively claims. Here we can see, once again, that the metaphysics of comprehension is working even when we try actively to avoid it: by stressing the “incomprehensibility” of the horrors of the camps, we have turned the Holocaust into a sublime nonplace, and we feel disturbed when

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some testimony does not fit into that description. To call the Holocaust “unique” or “nonrepresentable” may also be a technique of comprehension and appropriation. Given all the ethical questions that identification may raise, we must still ask if it is possible to do without it. Why would the witness give his or her testimony without any possibility for us to share it? How could we imagine the pain and fear of victims if we are not allowed, in our imagination, to replay some scene where we identify with the victims, and imagine “what it would have been like, if it had happened to me”? This act of imagination may be flawed, it may raise ethical problems, but one can always argue that without it we could not form any relation to otherness at all. And it seems impossible to define fiction as writing that is “using identification” and testimony as something that is simply “rejecting it,” as Eaglestone claims in the beginning of his book. In fact, as Eaglestone later makes clear, the “dyke” against identification in Holocaust testimonies is, indeed, often broken—one may even claim that all narratives necessarily create some kind of identification between the reader and the characters of the story. Testimonies do, in fact, share many textual strategies with fiction as, for example, Hayden White (2006) shows in his analysis of the use of figural language in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. In Anthelme and Kertesz, too, to take only a couple of canonical examples, we can discern many narrative techniques that arguably encourage identification. It is noteworthy, for example, that the focalizer in Kertesz’s Fatelessness is rather the young boy who is experiencing the events, and not the narrator, the one who survived the events and is writing from his retrospective position.3 This narrative technique—to limit the knowledge to that of the young self who did not yet know what to expect, who did not yet know that the trains did not lead him to a nice clean summer camp as he was told—not only adds gruesome irony to the narrative, but arguably invites the reader to identify with the young protagonist. On the other hand, however, character focalization may also be read as a technique that adds a level of fictionality to the text: the artificiality of the narrator’s solution to withdraw crucial information soon leads to the reader’s awareness of the rhetorical construction of the text, and thus resists identification. In fact, when Eaglestone actually begins to read Holocaust testimonies, he states that these testimonies create a double movement of identification and resistance to it. He writes, “The texts lead to identification and away from it simultaneously. This stress between centrifugal and centripetal forces is played out, but not resolved, in the texts of testimonies and it is this that characterizes the genre of testimony” (2004, 43).

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A Holocaust Orphan The tension between “centrifugal and centripetal forces,” between identification and resistance to identification, becomes especially crucial, claims Eaglestone, when we deal with the testimonies of the survivors’ children (2004, 73). Transference and identification are necessary in all parent-child relations, so the tales of survivors’ children—such as Art Spiegelmann’s Mauss, for example—must deal simultaneously with the natural need of all children to identify in some period of their life with their parents, and the very impossibility to identify with the experiences of Holocaust victims. Moreover, this aporia is the key not only to the problems of second generation survivors, but also to all of us who are born after the Holocaust and try to imagine how it was. We may claim that the tension between the need and the impossibility of identification becomes even more urgent when we deal with the accounts of Holocaust orphans. Survivors’ children have something to work with—the narratives of their parents—but in the case of Holocaust orphans, there is no narrative to begin with. As a result, the whole process where the child constructs his or her own identity becomes disturbed: how can one identify with an absence? Georges Perec was a Holocaust orphan. He was born to an immigrant Polish-Jewish family in France, but during World War II, his father died at the front, and his mother was deported to Auschwitz and disappeared. After he had lost his parents, Georges Perec was brought up by different relatives: aunts and grandparents. Later he became one of the most celebrated of French avant-garde authors, whose impact on what we nowadays call “postmodern” literature has been crucial. He participated in the work of the avantgarde group OuLiPo, Ouvrier de la Littérature Potentielle, and published many novels, including, for example, Disapparition, a novel that was written without using the letter e, and a rich chronicle of lives in an apartment building in Paris, La Vie mode d’emploi. In fact, already the playful and self-conscious nature of his literary works may raise some suspicions concerning the nature of his “autobiography”: the reader may also ask if Perec, in his autobiographical text, is too much a fabulist to be taken as a reliable witness. As we will see, this suspicion is not totally ungrounded—although I will claim, at the same time, that it is exactly Perec’s skills as a fabulist that makes his testimony so truthful and valuable. Parts of W ou le souvenir d’enfance were first published as a feuilleton in a literary journal, then as a whole in 1974. It contains two texts that alternate with each other. The odd chapters, printed in italics, belong to the story of an island in Patagonia called W, a kind of totalitarian state that is totally

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dedicated to athletics. As Perec tells us, this story “reconstructs” a fantasy that he developed at the age of thirteen. The even chapters, printed in bold font, belong to an autobiographical narrative where Perec recalls some memories of his own childhood—or rather flashbacks that in some cases seem to be actual memories, in other cases perhaps constructed memories or fantasies. It is also noteworthy that in the middle of the book, where chronologically there should be an autobiographical chapter telling about the most decisive event of his childhood, his mother’s death in Auschwitz, there is only an empty page with three ellipses points in parentheses. The more one reads the fictional story of W, the clearer it becomes that life in the dystopian world of athletes increasingly starts to resemble the topic that has been suppressed in the autobiographical tale: living conditions in the Nazi concentration camps. It is not a miracle, then, that Perec’s book has been recently read in the light of trauma theory, for example, by Lawrence D. Kritzman (2005). As Kritzman says, “W thus interfaces with the unnamed pain of childhood memories and this suggests that what resists narration might be recuperated through the spectatorship of a fictional world” (2005, 192). The thing that was too horrible to be told in autobiography—a mother’s death in Holocaust—wrote its way into fantasy. The Fantasy of W In the beginning of the fictional story of W (with chapters printed in italics), a person whose real name we are not told, but who has adopted a false identity under the name of Gaspard Winkler, relates the story of how he was encouraged to go to Patagonia in search of a small child whose name and passport he has received. The child, the real Gaspard Winkler, as the representative of Bureau veritas, Otto Apfelstahl explains to the narrator, had become a deaf-mute, probably because of some unhealed childhood trauma. His mother took the child on a trip in order to heal him, but they were shipwrecked in Patagonia, where the mother died in a horrible way, and the boy disappeared. Here we can already note some traces that hint at Perec’s own autobiography: a child who is unable to speak or hear because of a deep trauma, and the death of the mother, this time described (unlike in the autobiographical text) almost in graphic detail. We may here also mention, as the narrator of the autobiographical tale reveals, that the name Gaspard Winkler appeared in the first finished (but never published) novel of Perec, La Condottiere, where it belonged to a forgerer of art works, thus hinting that there might also be a forgery lurking in the story of W. After W ou le souvenir

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d’enfance, the name Gaspard Winkler reappears also in Perec’s monumental La Vie mode d’emploi (Perec 1978), where it belongs to a manufacturer of puzzles who plays a dirty trick on his employer: Bartlebooth is found dead with a W-shaped piece in his hand, while the last empty space of the last puzzle is in form of an X. “Did you ever wonder what became of the person who gave you your name,” asks Apfelstahl of the false Gaspard. The question actually refers to the child, the real Gaspard, and can perhaps be interpreted as an allegory for the task of the adult Georges Perec to discover what became of that small child, young Georges. However, as the hesitation of Gaspard reveals, it also contains another question: what became of the parents that once gave him his name? The quest that Gaspard Winkler receives from Otto Apfelstahl can, therefore, be read as an allegory for the quest of an adult narrator of the autobiographical story: to find out what happened to his mother and father, and what happened to that small child who became an orphan and lost the identity he once had. The story of the false Gaspard Winkler, written in the style of a detective story, is interrupted in the middle of the book by an empty page with three ellipses points. Instead of continuing the detective plot, the second part offers a kind of pseudoethnographical description of the island of W in Patagonia and its strange forms of life, written in an objective, nonpersonal tone. Although the narrator of the detective story, the “false” Gaspard Winkler, says in the end that he will go to Patagonia, it is ultimately not possible for the reader to decide whether the narrator of the second part is still the same as the one in the first part or not. In the beginning of the pseudoethnographical description, the island seems to be just a strange utopian society that has been organized around huge sporting events, Olympics, Spartakiads, and Atlantiads. However, the farther along the reader gets in the story, the more the daily life on the island of W—mechanisms of humiliation, undernourishment, physical punishments, destruction of most of the female children, an uncontested but unpredictable and unknowable law—begins to resemble the living conditions in Nazi concentration camps. The connection is affirmed by the last “autobiographical” chapter that quotes an eyewitness report of the Holocaust, stressing the omnipresence of absurd and physically humiliating “sport” in the camps—that is, nonproductive forced labor that was aimed rather at starvation and total annihilation of one’s human nature than at any concrete goals. At this moment in the book, then, it should be obvious for the reader that the story of W serves as an allegory for Holocaust.

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An Autobiography In the first chapter of the autobiographical story, Perec tells us that the story of W is, in fact, a reconstruction of a story that he himself invented, narrated and illustrated at the age of thirteen. The story as he then created it disappeared and was forgotten, until one evening in 1967, when he recollected it, or at least its topic: it was a story about a society of athletes in Patagonia, and it was “if not the story, at least a story of my childhood.” Later, Perec found some drawings from that period—four of them have actually been recognized from his papers. He then reconstructed the story of W and published it as a feuilleton in a literary magazine, Quinzaine littéraire, in 1969 to 1970. It then took four years for Perec to complete the other, autobiographical text of the book, and publish them both in the final form, side by side, in 1974. All of this is related by the narrator of the autobiographic story—but as we will see, this is not the whole truth of the birth process of the book. The narrator of the autobiographical story—let’s call him Perec—begins by confirming provocatively, “I have no childhood memories.” Perec adds, however, that this is really a kind of excuse: another history, the History with a capital “hache” (letter H and “axe” in French—referring also to History as Holocaust), had already given the response (the war, the camps), so he could always refuse to answer any questions about his childhood. After that provocative beginning, the narrator begins to recall and interpret those memories and flashbacks he does have. The death of his mother in the camps is mentioned in the seventh chapter, but in a cold, matter-of-fact style without any details or emotional impact. Most of the memories are, however, very uncertain, fragmented, and sometimes he tells several versions of the same memories. He adds notes to them, where he checks the facts and finds out that many of them were probably later constructions, influenced by works of fiction or accidents that had happened to other people. In other words, memory is treated not as a mere warehouse of direct traces from the past—instead, it is seen as an active process in which we are constantly constructing our identity. The care that Perec gives to recording not only those memories that are probably genuine, but also those that are probably constructed afterwards, reveals that the true significance of his childhood memories is not really in their validity as reliable documents, but in the way the mind constructs “a past,” starting from small fragments, flashbacks, and micronarratives. Especially revealing are many constructed memories, where Perec remembers himself as having suffered some accident, but finds out that the event cannot be confirmed. Under their factual falsity, those constructed memories carry another, more significant truth: the experience of the child as a carrier of an unhealed wound, a trauma.

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Perec’s biographer, David Bellos, states that the autobiographical text is “riddled with errors,” and suggests that even though the main lines are correct, many details seem to be intentionally false (1993, 546). According to Bellos, Perec, obsessed with details, has probably left those errors consciously as clues for the reader (a technique that Perec uses also in La vie mode d’emploi). For example, the detail that the narrator repeats—that when young Georges last saw his mother in a railway station, he saw a comic book showing Charlie Chaplin as a parachutist—just cannot be true, primarily because of his movie The Great Dictator, Chaplin was a persona non grata in the Nazi regime, and comic books based on his character were not available at that time. In fact, this error could be just a screen memory, meant to hide the shameful truth of the event: that the child did not understand at the moment that he left his mother for good, and therefore felt guilty later for not having taken care of her. Moreover, one could also just as easily interpret the memory as representing the situation of the child as hanging in the air, without any means of real support. Perec’s mother’s fate was not immediately revealed to the child in all its horror. Since there were no official records of his mother’s final death, the family received a death certificate only in the late 1950s. Without a body, there was no opportunity for proper mourning. This absence of loss, the absence of the decisive moment of loss, might be reflected in the story of W, where the “false” Gaspard Winkler tells only that his father has died, but does not say a word about his mother. Numerous otherwise curious details in Perec’s book can be explained through the mechanism of repression and reworking through fiction. For example, at the beginning of the story of W, a waiter asks—twice—if Gaspard Winkler wants a pretzel with his beer. Gaspard says no. In the autobiographical story, Perec mentions that his family name comes from the Hebrew “Peretz,” which means a “hole,” and that in Hungarian, it refers also to what we call “pretzel”—pain that has a hole in its middle. So by refusing to take the pretzel, Gaspard tries to deny his true identity, identity that is nothing but a hole. The strange appeal that the fictive world of W has for young Georges could perhaps be compared to dream work. Here we can refer, for example, to the way that Freud and Lacan interpret a dream that Freud’s patient once had—readings that also Cathy Caruth refers to in her Unclaimed Experience (1996, 91–112). Freud tells us in The Intepretation of Dreams about the dream of a patient who had lost his son. At night, the corpse of the son was in the next room, an old man was watching it, and the father went to bed to have some rest. In his

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dream, the father saw his son in flames, and heard the son saying, “Father, don’t you see, I am burning.” The father woke up, and saw, indeed, that in the next room the candle had fallen and had lit the corpse of his son on fire. Freud interpreted that the dream fulfilled the father’s wish to see his son awake once again, even to the point where the dream urged him to continue sleeping while his son was indeed in flames (1981, 509–10). However, as Lacan later pointed out, the call to wake up also took place in the dream— the dream both fulfilled the wish of the consciousness not to awake, and the imperative to wake up (1973, 57–58). Perhaps fantasies and fiction function sometimes, too, as a way in which consciousness protects itself from waking to reality. However, fiction may also include an imperative to wake up, to leave the fiction—an imperative that paradoxically can only be heard in fiction. We may thus think that the young Georges tried to escape the hard reality into fantasy, but the small pieces of information that he had received from his mother’s fate in Auschwitz wrote themselves into fantasy. Reading the Trauma of the Reader In the autobiographical text, Perec makes clear that all his childhood memories are more or less unreliable. However, how real or reliable is the implied story of the book, where trauma becomes transformed into a fantasy? After all, as Perec tells us, by the evening in Venice 1969, he had forgotten almost everything about the story of W. The story that we read is the reconstruction of an adult, not the story that the thirteen-year-old boy had invented. In fact, the story of W seems to suit trauma theory almost too well. What Perec did not say in the final version of the book, but that he was originally going to reveal, according to the first notes for the book that Philippe Lejeune has later published, was that Perec created the fantasy of W originally in 1949 during therapy sessions with the young psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, who later became one of the most important figures in the development of adolescent psychology (Lejeune 1991). We do not know much about the sessions, but we do know that the starting point for them was, indeed, the world of W, the stories and drawings that young George had made about the athletes in W. It might even be that the story was not only analyzed by Dolto, but that she actively encouraged young Georges to create it. Since Perec admits that he does not remember any details of his original stories, where did the idea to use the society of W as a metaphor for concentration camps come from? From Dolto? Perhaps Freudian trauma theory suits the interpretation of Perece’s book so well, precisely because the original idea for it came

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from Freudian theory in the first place. We can even imagine that the case of the adolescent Georges was discussed in the meetings of école Freudienne in Paris that Dolto had founded with Jacques Lacan—and was thus affecting the development of Freudian trauma theory in France. It is certain that young Georges suffered from the loss of his parents. But can we read it directly from his adolescent fantasies? I must admit that it is hard to trace any traumatic content from the only original drawing that I have seen, printed in the biography of Bellos—in the picture there seems to be just normal athletes, not very well drawn, but not starving or humiliated in any way. Perhaps Dolto’s analysis was correct. Or perhaps it was produced by an overactive Freudian imagination. We cannot say—but what we can say is that at the time, when Perec started to “reconstruct” the story of W, he was not an innocent witness of his childhood trauma but a highly self-conscious author who used his wide knowledge on psychoanalysis—from therapies with Dolto and two other analysts over the years, and from Freudian literature that he had read—in constructing two texts and their juxtaposition. Perhaps the name of Gaspard Winkler as the alter ego of the author is a hint that the book itself is a kind of forgery. Or, if not a forgery, then a puzzle, or an extremely complicated play of hide-and-seek, as we are told in the autobiographical text. Perec writes, “Une fois de plus, les pièges de l’ecriture se mirent en place. Une fois de plus, je fus comme un enfant qui joue à cache-cache et qui ne sait pas ce qu’il craint ou desire plus: rester caché, être découvert” (1975, 14). What first seems to be a fairly reliable distinction between fiction and nonfiction becomes challenged in the book. The reader is, indeed, able to readily recognize fiction from autobiography merely from their style, thus partly affirming Dorrit Cohn’s (1999) theory on the “sign-posts of fiction.” However, the manifold connections between the two, the manifold “fabulations” in autobiographical text and the status of the fictional story as revealing the most essential repressed memory, suggest that we should read the book as a whole as belonging to some third genre, beyond the distinction fiction/nonfiction. We may here return to the question of textual encounter: what kind of positions for identification or distance does Perec’s book offer to the reader? Or, to be more precise, what positions do (a) the story of W, (b) the autobiographical text, and (c) their combination as two juxtaposed texts produce? First of all, it is clear that Perec’s book does make a direct identification difficult, just as Eaglestone says that Holocaust testimonies do. Should we identify with the “false” Gaspard Winkler, someone who lives under a false identity and carries the name of a deaf-mute child (or, if we want to follow

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the intertextual links in the book, a forger or a manufacturer of puzzles)? Or should we identify with the narrator of the autobiographical text, in spite of his failure to provide us with a coherent and valid narrative of his childhood? Or with that young child, Georges, who is only present as a series of highly unreliable memories? Even though in some memories, the focalizer seems to be Georges as a child, it is clear that the child’s experience is always filtered through the adult’s memory and the author’s rhetorical mastery that ultimately hides the child from our sight. However, as we can also see from Perec’s working notes, it was Perec’s original plan not just to juxtapose two texts, fiction and autobiography, but also to provide a third text, an analytic text that would have analyzed the relation between fiction and autobiography. Some elements of this third text, “intertext” as the plan indicates, may be found from the autobiographical text, for example, descriptions of photographs and notes. It is noteworthy, however, that in the final version, all references to Dolto and psychoanalysis are left out. What does this omission tell us? If there is some position that the reader is encouraged to identify with, it is, I would like to suggest, the narrator of the third, omitted text. By omitting the critical analysis of these two texts, Perec seems to have left the task of connecting these two texts to the reader. It is the reader who must analyze the connection between fiction and autobiography, and the story about trauma and its narrativization. At the same time, identification with this absent third voice produces a curious effect: in the place of identity, there is a hole, a gap between fiction and memory, between the narrated story and the real story that resists narration. So, what kind of truths can we find from Perec’s book? We may learn some elements of his autobiography, although as Bellos has shown, they are not always reliable. We may better understand the experience of a Holocaust orphan, a second-generation survivor whose parents have died. However, it is perhaps more important that the reader is invited to analyze the relationship between fiction and autobiography—and thus also see the connections between his or her own traumas, fantasies, and that textual construction that we call autobiography, writing one’s own life. Perec’s book is a work of literature, and it is thus less a representation of his childhood trauma than a textual machine that helps the reader to acknowledge the way his or her own memory and imagination might work in the case of traumatic memories. There is a level of truth in Perec’s book, a valuable and touching truth. Nevertheless, this truth is, in spite of the fact that Perec was himself a Holocaust orphan, not so much historical truth as what Riffaterre called “fictional truth”—truth that owes less to the accuracy in which the text represents some pretextual world

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than to the parallels and resonances between the text and the reader’s own experientiality of trauma and memory in general. In the reading process, what is important is not so much the trauma of its author, but the traumas of all its possible readers. We do not have to know what details of the author’s biography are correct and what details are not, because the true significance of the text lies elsewhere, namely, in the way in which we all narrate our lives, both by constructing more or less autobiographical story from our memories and other pieces of information, and creating fictional stories in our dreams and fantasies. And the ultimate challenge for us is to learn to relate both kind of stories—and the truth that they both evoke—to each other. References Bellos, David. 1993. Georges Perec. A life in words. London: Harvill. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Celan, Paul. 1967. Atemwende. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1971. Speech-grille and selected poems. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Dutton. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. The distinction of fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Demeure: Fiction et temoignage. In Passions de la littérature. Avec Jacques Derrida, ed. Michel Lisse, 13–73. Paris: Galilée. ———. 2005. Poétique et politique du témoignage. Paris: L’Herne. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felman, Shoshona. 1992. Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub, 1–57. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1981/1900. Interpretation of dreams. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4 & 5. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth. Fuss, Diana. 1995. Identification papers. New York: Routledge. Kertesz, Imre. 2004. Fatelessness. Trans. Tim Wilkinson. New York: Vintage. Lacan, Jacques. 1973. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kritzman, Lawrence D. 2005. Remembrance of things past: Trauma and mourning in Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Journal of European Studies 35 (2): 187–200.

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Laub, Dori. 1992. An event without witness. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York: Routledge. Lejeune, Philippe. 1991. La mémoire et l’oblique. Georges Perec autobiographe. Paris: P. O. L. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perec, Georges. 1975. W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Paris: Denoël. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pihlainen, Kalle. 2006. The confines of the form: Historical writing and the desire that it be what it is not. In Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the history/literature debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen, 55–67. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Riffaterre, Michael. 1990. Fictional truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of discourse: Essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1987. The content of the form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2006. Historical Discourse and Literary Writing. In Tropes for the past: Hayden White and the history/literature debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wilkomirski, Benjamin. 1996. Fragments. Trans. Carol Janeway. London: Picador.

Notes 1. In the original German: “Niemand/zeugt für den/Zeugen,” in the poem “Aschenglorie,” in Celan 1967, 68. 2. See also Dominick LaCapra, who states, “By identification I mean the unmediated fusion of self and other in which the otherness or alterity of the other is not recognized and respected” (2001, 27n31). 3. For focalization in retrospective, first-person narration, see Phelan 2005.

CHAPTER 7

Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and the Circulation of Trauma Matti Hyvärinen

T

error is an everyday occurrence in every country, township, and factory, where animal farming is practiced. The everyday life of farmed animals is nothing less than what happened during the Holocaust. These are but a few of the poignant claims made by the novelist Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2004). Coetzee himself might easily be recognized as a paradigmatically political author in such texts ranging from Waiting for the Barbarians to Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. Perhaps in part because his books have so often been read as straightforward political comments, and as his political comments, he seems to distance himself from all these quick conclusions by way of this complex, self-ironic novel. As a result, Elizabeth Costello is not only about terror, it is also about circulating and distributing terror and trauma through language and speech. The aim of this chapter is not to reveal Coetzee’s political opinions with regard to animals; rather, it aims at understanding how literary fiction can pose the issues of trauma and terror in new contextual ways. Coetzee-the-author offers a series of explicit and less explicit reading guidelines, and these guidelines are profoundly helpful for everyone who endeavors to read self-conscious fiction, or arts in general, politically. Elizabeth Costello is quite openly a novel of ideas. To enforce this model, and certainly not without irony, Coetzee has subtitled his book, Eight Lessons. To start with, we do not have titled or numbered “chapters” or any other way to chart the natural flow of events to identify with, just eight separate but

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intertwined lessons. In addition, we are not provided with a full account of Elizabeth Costello’s life before or between these lessons. However, the lessons themselves are narrative sections, organized around the life of the Australian writer Elizabeth Costello in her mature years. Most of these lessons feature a public talk, a lecture, either given or attended by Costello. From the outset, the novel delineates a tension between the public role of an author as a speaker, as giving talks, and her actual role as an author. As we will later see, these roles do not necessarily coincide with each other perfectly. Arguably, this infers a tension between ideas, beliefs, talks of the flesh-and-blood author J. M. Coetzee, and the authorial performance of his novels (on these distinctions, see Phelan 2005). Were there no tension or difference between these two forms of expression, the talks and the novels, there would be no particular reason to read fiction politically. This obvious division of the roles of the author-as-character can be complemented with a functional distinction suggested by James Phelan (2005, 12–13). He suggests that “character functions” can be seen on three levels, separating “the ways in which characters work as representations of possible people [what Phelan calls their mimetic function], as representative of larger groups of ideas [their thematic functions in Phelan’s terms], and as artful constructs within the larger construct of the work [what Phelan calls their synthetic functions].” It may be legitimate to argue that the mimetic function of the main character is constrained almost to the limit of plausibility, whereas the thematic function dominates much of the early chapters, before giving way to an emphasis on the synthetic functions at the end of the novel. The novel, thus, includes eight lessons and at least six separate talks in context as embedded within these lessons. Elizabeth talks about realism, the lives of animals—both from the perspective of philosophers and poets—and about the problem of evil. An African writer gives a talk on “the novel in Africa,” and Elizabeth’s sister Blanche on “the humanities in Africa.” Even though these talks may at first appear analogous in portraying a traveler, a new context, a talk, and a response by the audience, the lessons are narrated on far from equal terms. The author provides access to the talks from diverse distances, thereby leading us to assume different attitudes toward the speakers. Traveling Focalization Literary theorists have used a number of terms, such as center of consciousness, perspective, and focalization to describe the point of view from which events are seen, sensed or observed. Gerard Genette (1980, 185–98) pointed

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out that the earlier visual terms “perspective” and “point of view” problematically merged the positions of the one who observes and the one who speaks. In response, he suggested a clear distinction between focalizor (observer) and narrator (speaker) (see also Rimmon-Kenan 1991; Herman 2002). As Mieke Bal (1997, 143–44) notes, there is one additional merit in the terminology of focalizing: the word is more flexible in terms of inflection. Therefore, we can have terms for the process (focalizing), the subject (focalizor), and the object of observation (focalized). Some focalizors are internal or character-bound, meaning that we see and experience everything through the senses of one or more characters; in other cases, the focalizors are not characters of the story, and are thus called external. It is noteworthy that focalization and narration do not necessarily overlap. A third-person narration may as well reveal the characters’ most intimate thoughts and feelings. For example, Ian McEwan’s (2005) Saturday uses such a technique in accounting for one day in the life of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. A strictly internal, character-bound focalizor is naturally tied to the perceptions of that particular character, and cannot reveal other persons’ innermost thoughts. In representing fictional consciousnesses, however, the distinction between focalized and focalizor cannot be absolute, as Alan Palmer (2004, 49) has noted. While Henry Perowne is Saturday’s focalizor, he, of course, is also focalized, that is, observed by himself. Finally, works of fiction vary remarkably as regarding how fixed or swiftly moving the focalization is presented. Without a doubt, focalization is an ideologically powerful tool. “If the focalizor coincides with the character,” Mieke Bal (1997, 146) maintains, “that character will have an advantage over the other characters. The reader watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle, be inclined to accept the vision presented by that character.” John Updike’s (2006) Terrorist realizes its strong critical edge due much to the fact that the young Islamist Ahmad is its key focalizor. Elizabeth Costello’s lessons vary importantly in terms of focalization. As a rule, the speaker is not the focalizor, yet the focalizor is not just a curious or neutral member of the audience. When Elizabeth Costello gives her talks, either on realism or on the lives of animals, the focalizor is either external or it is her son John. We view both the black African author and Elizabeth’s sister, Blanche, through the lenses of Elizabeth’s critical consciousness. These solutions build distance between speakers and the reader, and help to resist any easy identification. Even before Costello’s first talk on realism, a good dose of skepticism is provided by her son, who ponders, “Her thoughts would be, he suspects, as

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uninteresting as most people’s. A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk and cheese” (Coetzee 2004, 10). By quoting John’s thoughts, the author makes relevant the distinction between the roles of author-as-aspeaker and author-as-a-writer. His mother’s weariness, her “still greasylooking” hair, and an outfit distantly resembling that of Daisy Duck are features that help provide a certain distance. There is a strong resistance to the mimetic function. The narrator bluntly foregrounds the synthetic, textual function by following John’s thoughts, saying, “The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of modern realism” (4). To accentuate the overall relevance of John’s thoughts, we are informed that the son nevertheless follows and helps his mother “out of love” (3). Even Costello’s closest associates do not thus constitute a solid, like-minded community around her. There is a crack, a distance for the reader to step in and find more space to breathe and think. The Animal Dilemma The third lesson, with a complicated title The Lives of Animals. One: The Philosophers and the Animals, begins with a particularly tense situation. Elizabeth Costello has been invited to give two talks at her son’s college in the United States, and stays at his house during the visit. Elizabeth initiates the first critical scene by asking why the children are eating in the playroom, and not at the same table with the guest and their parents. Elizabeth insists on receiving an explanation, even though she knows well in advance that the children are eating chicken, something she herself does not want to see at the table. John tries very hard to find a balance between his straightforward mother and his equally outspoken wife Norma, a philosopher of mind from the same college. From the outset, it is clear that this will not be a happy encounter. Norma “has never hesitated to tell [John] that his mother’s books are overrated, that her opinions on animals, animal consciousness and ethical relations with animals are jejune and sentimental” (61). Elizabeth’s talk is concise, multilayered, and provocative. Even during the talk, we are invited to take distance and look at the situation through John’s consciousness. The narrator explains that “because of the flatness of her delivery, because she does not look up from the page, [John] feels that what she is saying lacks impact. . . . He does not look forward to what is coming. He does not want to hear his mother talking about death” (63). But death is what she is going to talk about. By introducing the theme of animal lives, she makes rhetorical use of the disnarrated. Costello declares, “I will pay you the honor

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of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths” (63). Instead, she takes a detour through the Holocaust: Between 1942 and 1945 several million people were put to death in the concentration camps of the Third Reich: at Treblinka alone more than a million and half. The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in general they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake. (63–64)

The listeners, who do not properly know or are not interested in what happens to animals in their neighborhoods, are put on an equal footing with people who lived next to Treblinka. The comparison between the Holocaust and the treatment of animals fills the rhetorical void created by skipping the details. After a while, Costello discovers an entirely new dimension of her key comparison. She says, “They [Holocaust victims] went like sheep to the slaughter. . . . They died like animals. . . . The Nazi butchers killed them. . . . Denunciation of the camps reverberates fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals” (64–65). At this point, Costello’s argument is perhaps at its most powerful. The talk draws our attention to the curious fact that the unusually cruel and obscene treatment of human beings is regularly represented by a discourse on animals. The animal is, in this language, the absolute other, the natural site of cruelty and instrumentality. The uncanniness of the quote may be tested by trying to replace “animal” by any politically incorrect expression of segregation or subjugation. The quote would be either implausible or so gravely prejudiced that it would be counterproductive. But using animals in those sentences is still dreadfully natural. It is almost as if the power of language would betray exactly those people who resist oppression, racism, and cruelty, and as if the capacity to express extremities would dissolve in case the decent treatment of animals would be the intuitive presupposition. That is, in case they would not be treated “animally” but “humanly.” Costello proceeds next to discuss intelligence tests conducted on chimpanzees. She foregrounds the cruelty attached to the imprisonment and solitary confinement, but seems simultaneously to take an odd step toward humanizing the animals. She suddenly turns to fiercely criticizing the philosopher Thomas

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Nagel. Nagel had posed the question concerning what it is like to be a bat. According to Nagel, we can only know how a bat behaves. She quotes Nagel, “Merely to imagine what it is like to live as a bat does, says Mr Nagel—to imagine spending our nights flying around catching insects in our mouths, navigating by sound instead of sight, and our days hanging upside down— is not good enough, because all that tells us is what it is like to behave like a bat” (76). Nagel’s thought might enable the recognition of the radical difference between us and bats or other animals, to help us delimit the colonizing impulse of human consciousness. Instead, Costello chooses to attack the idea passionately. Her key reply is that she is able to imagine herself as dead. If she can do that, why could she not imagine herself as a bat? “To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being,” she retorts (77). From this observation, she returns to the Nazis and their incapacity to imagine themselves in the cattle cars, that is, as Jews. This coldness indicates the lack of any capacity for empathy. By this means, Elizabeth Costello is ready to conclude, “If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed [referring here to her fictional figures], then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life” (80). Can I, then, competently imagine being a Muslim woman, Islamist fighter, or an Australian aboriginal? Are imagination and “fullness of being” universal keys to another being’s experience? Costello is obviously mixing a few things here. One can indeed imagine a mental world where houses and trees act and suffer, but it is not necessarily the same thing as understanding houses. It is extremely difficult to imagine oneself without the level of assumed key mental capacities—and their deficiencies—of observation, feeling, reflection, and language that are a characteristic feature of humans; therefore such imagination necessarily inappropriately transfers human reasoning and mentalities to fictional animals. It is enough to remember the conceptual difficulties of writing history without anachronistic exports from contemporary thought. Empathy, as important as it is in terms of ethics and politics, does not offer much in the way of understanding bats. And why stop with bats and oysters? Can we not work our imagination into that of a birch tree? Even though I fully know that cars do not actually think and feel, there is nothing to stop one from feeling empathy with his or her old car, and to imagine its sufferings, wishes, or cravings for the fresh spring air. The imagining of bats was vital to Costello for a particular reason. The most horrendous feature in death camps was not that humans treated other

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humans like lice, because that would be “too abstract,” as she reckons. The worst thing was that the perpetrators failed to think themselves in the position of their victims (79); the divide between “we” and “them” was too absolute. Costello is right; to imagine the horrors of victims would have made the crimes much harder to execute. Still we are on a slippery ground because many theories and testimonies of the Holocaust resist the very idea of “understanding” the experience of concentration camps (see, for example, T. Parvikko in this volume). In a problematic way, we seem to come back to the human, cognitive capacity to narrativize almost anything. To narrativize the life of animals from the human perspective by way of an uncontrolled imagination could well be criticized as a new form of colonization. Costello’s discussion on the intelligence tests of chimpanzees fails precisely here. She introduces the test animals and their dilemmas as if they were human-like thinkers, without proper notice of the particular mental qualities of the species. In this imagination, the bats do not have independent worlds constitutive of their own priorities, nor their own cognitive ways of world-making. Here I suggest Yann Martel’s (2002) The Life of Pi as an alternative and intriguing attempt to understand and honor the otherness of animals qua animals. Animals and Concentration Camps The strong comparison between the Holocaust and the cruelty against animals in the food industry is the key idea of Elizabeth Costello’s talk. But how legitimate is this comparison? It is problematic both ethically and politically if events within radical trauma and suffering are transformed into aspects of political competition. In such a case, the position “Our suffering surpasses all other historical sufferings and cannot be compared with any other sufferings” becomes as problematic as its abstract counterpart, according to which “All suffering and destruction is equally bad.” Costello herself seems to lean toward the second alternative. She muses, “A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air: who dare say which is the worse?” (159). Even though all distinctions are necessarily negotiable and questionable, it is, however, necessary to acknowledge the ethical and historical gradations of evil actions. In contrast to Costello’s comparison, some remarkable differences remain. No matter how ethically problematic contemporary industrial animal farming is, the purpose of the industry is not to keep the inmates in extreme hunger, cold, and forced labor day after day, until their death by starvation. No known farmer is working to annihilate cows, chickens, pigs, or horses out

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of existence and of natural history. The farmed animals are not hunted from amongst a free and wild life, stigmatized, and then closed into overpopulated and purposely cruel camps. Indeed, cruelty is hardly the conscious purpose of animal farming, and as a counterpart, there is no such thing in nature as a kind and stress-free way of dying at an old, dignified age. The conditions of animal farming are thus, at least potentially, a matter of negotiation and possible reform, whereas the suffering of the Holocaust victims was exactly the point and thus absolutely beyond reform and mitigation. Of course, it is debatable as to how much such differences matter, and what ethical consequences they may hold. What I find worth resisting, even repulsive, however, is the transformation of the Holocaust experience to that of a free-for-all rhetorical tool to boost other political and ideological issues whatsoever, even apparently good ones. If we accept that we truly can drop key historical characteristics of the Holocaust, in the name of abstract “evilness,” and turn the figure into a generalized source of outrage, we are on the slippery slope toward normalizing the experience itself. Following Costello, the Holocaust is always already deeply rooted in every town. She seems to declare a sort of “animal universalism,” and strong emotional continuity from human beings to that of bats and oysters. This is a sound argument against the binary opposition between humans and animals, and yet, by the same token, it erases the significance of all differences. Shall we now renounce all distinctions and consider eating our neighbors on equal terms with the eating of oysters? Against this universalistic line of reasoning arises a theme of particular relevance for those who are closest to us. Norma, Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law, grows more and more hostile toward Costello’s line of argumentation. In addition to her more academic comments, there is one particularly important remark made to her husband, the night before Elizabeth’s departure. Norma bursts out, “I would have more respect for her if she didn’t try to undermine me behind my back, with her stories to the children about the poor little veal calves and what the bad men do to them. I’m tired of having them pick at their food and ask, ‘Mom, is this veal?’ when it’s chicken or tuna fish. It’s nothing but a power game” (113–14). Costello, in turn, is herself agonized by the contradiction between her absolute principles and nonresponse on the part of people she encounters. On the trip to the airport, Elizabeth talks to her son. She tells him, “It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easy among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? . . . It’s as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark

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about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins’” (114–15). We may read these lectures as desperate ethical-cum-political argumentation. Some readers may find them repulsively self-righteous. The irritation and tension between these interpretations offers the first instance of “too much terror.” In these two lessons, Elizabeth Costello is on her moral mission and does not hesitate to throw graphic details and wild comparisons at her audience in order to promote her cause. She gives little thought to the peace of her son’s family life, and she does not hesitate to evoke the imagination of little children. Terror, shock, graphic details—they are good enough tools to promote a good cause. In a manner of speaking, this section presents Elizabeth Costello declaring war against terror. Elizabeth in Africa Lesson five, the Humanities in Africa, is given by Blanche Costello, a Catholic nun and Elizabeth’s sister. This time we experience everything through Elizabeth. Blanche’s talk is a provocative, dogmatically Catholic attack on the relevance of the humanities. Her talk is indeed a hard piece to digest in a college of the humanities but, after all, it is a coolly academic talk without evocative, emotional images. Ironically, in the previous lesson, Costello did all she knew how in order to erase the distinction between human beings and animals; now in Africa, she is affronted by Blanche’s attack on humanism. During one of their conversations, we are informed of Elizabeth’s thoughts, “She does not like it when her sister gets on her high horse and preaches. It happened during her speech in Johannesburg and it is happening again. All that is most intolerant in Blanche’s character emerges at such times: intolerant and rigid and bullying” (138). The whole setting of Elizabeth’s lessons is reversed. Now Elizabeth is—in vain, it seems—seeking out personal closeness with her sister, “on the brink of passing” (155). During the previous lesson, Costello hardly recognized the feelings of her family and never missed the opportunity to preach, to project her intolerance and self-righteousness. Is this at all the same person? What has happened to her, and her own sermons? The effect of introducing a sermonizing and dogmatic sister is to relativize the previous Elizabeth herself. While the thematic function of Elisabeth’s character was more prominent when she preached about animals, she now recovers a lot of mimetic credibility. We are about to become more familiar with Elizabeth than previously.

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The Problem of Evil The sixth lesson, the problem of evil, marks a return of the earlier themes while shifting the setting of narration. This is the first lesson with a speaker who is also the focalizor. Therefore, we are ushered into Elizabeth’s inner tremors and scruples during the preparation and execution of the talk. Elizabeth has been invited to Amsterdam to give a talk on the problem of evil, an offer she would have immediately rejected had she not read Paul West’s book on the last days of the group of conspirators against Hitler. At the end of the story, the conspirators are humiliated and hung in a cellar. She thinks, “That is what Paul West, novelist, had written about, page after page, leaving nothing out; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands. Obscene! She wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes” (158–59). Does the name of the author Paul West imply a broader cultural criticism against “Western” fascination of suffering and trauma? In Africa, Costello was shocked by the case of an adept craftsman working for Blanche. The man, by no coincidence called “Joseph,” never did anything other than wooden crucifixes, day in, day out, dedicating his whole adult life to the sufferings of Jesus. By carving and imagining such sufferings, the black Joseph was vicariously partaking of the paternity of Jesus and the culture of suffering. Elizabeth now considers that Paul West has gone too deeply into the soul of the executioners. The horror of the victims is portrayed far too graphically, from point to point, rendering them without any dignity. The evil inscribed so powerfully has caught Paul West as well, and eventually even Elizabeth herself as a reader. And what about us, the readers and commentators of Coetzee? What Coetzee does here is to suddenly foreground the synthetic, textual function. The case of animal suffering was mainly discussed on a thematic level, as ideas roaming in the human world, while here we are reminded of the effects of texts, inviting us to recognize the novel and the story as artistic product. Costello is haunted by a doubt that she is herself simply too sensitive, getting too old and too responsive to emotional shocks. Was not her first lesson on “realism,” and what other than realism and freedom of speech can be considered in the wake of the horrific and repulsive facts as Paul West has documented them? Trauma studies offer a different perspective on the ethics of representing trauma. Following the work of Dominick LaCapra (2001; 2004, 73–105), for example, I suggest the concept of transitional trauma. Like evil,

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trauma is able to catch people who were not originally subjected to it. The concept was at first used to characterize the problem of intergenerational and interpersonal transition from the extreme traumas of the Holocaust. Historiographers and artists often disregard the fact that in studying trauma intensively from the perspective of victims, perpetrators, or the immediate spectators, they are themselves exposed to the effects of transitional trauma. To put it simply, we are not inviolable. An artist or a scholar who delves into trauma, into the inner workings of terror, is always at risk of repeating the original trauma and terror emotionally. Eelco Runia (2004) gives a powerful example of such “parallel processing” in the case of the official Dutch study to the UN/Dutch failure in protecting the Muslim population in Srebrenica. This problem of representing trauma and terror grows out of the problematic experience of trauma as such. Often trauma seems to be entirely inaccessible, without any proper memory of the event. Often the cognition and emotion appear separately: either one remembers the event coolly, without any touch of emotion, or one experiences the shocking emotion in the form of acting out or repeating the original scene. There is however, as LaCapra continues to emphasize, a possibility of the partial working through of the traumatic experience. But because working through and acting out are not binary oppositions, which could be kept in entirely separate worlds, the process of working-through itself assumes elements or moments of the repetition of the traumatic scene. Elizabeth Costello, in this sixth lesson, is indeed negotiating over how much she is ready to receive of the traumatic imagery in the form of sheer and raw repetition at the risk of being traumatized and harmed herself. How much should she justifiably presume of artistic and emotional workingthrough, including an artistic distance to horror? I quote, “Obscene: not just the deeds of Hitler’s executioners, not just the deeds of the blockman, but the pages of Paul West’s black book too. Scenes that do not belong in the light of day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from” (159). Costello considers that West indeed is obsessed with a desire to go too close to such evil. So we travel with her to the Free University of Amsterdam. The day before her talk, Elizabeth learns that the writer Paul West will attend the conference. This changes almost everything. She was prepared to talk about an absent, unknown, and abstract novelist, and instead she has a concrete, flesh-and-blood author in the audience to deal with. In this rhetoricalcum-ethical setting, the difference between implied author (Booth 1961) and flesh-and-blood writer as a person is vital. Is she at all fair to Paul West? Is it at all tolerable to say such things about the touch of evil to a person attending her lecture? If I translate Elizabeth’s agony into the language I suggested

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earlier, we might ask whether Elizabeth’s own strong emotional and ethical reaction against Paul West is one more moment of acting out the trauma or not. In reacting to evil and the trauma it has issued forth, there is no site of absolute goodness, no solid ethical ground with which to climb onto the moral high horse of the earlier lessons. Elizabeth’s agony leads to a desperate attempt to rewrite her whole talk. She hectically tries to meet West in advance. In her musings, she questions the soundness of her whole thought. West is a writer just as she is. Yet she reasons that storytelling can open the bottle, and release the genie into the world, “and it costs all hell to get him back in again” (167). This is exactly the way trauma will be transferred. She concludes, momentarily, “Through Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world” (167–68). But Costello already ponders how West receives “thousands of defenders,” and she instead will be recognized as an old-fashioned fool. She can hear the defenders’ voice in her head, “Paul West is not a devil but a hero: he has ventured into the labyrinth of Europe’s past and faced down the Minotaur and returned to tell his tale” (168). Immediately before her talk, Costello finds West sitting in the back row. Awkwardly, she tries to make peace and mitigate in advance what she is going to say. She is a speaker in a state of full disarray, trying to claim and erase at the same time, to resist and criticize West while understanding him. Elizabeth Costello now works remarkably hard in order to take her audience’s emotions into account. The self-righteous air of earlier lessons has evaporated entirely. Nevertheless, Paul West does not respond at all. After the lecture, no discussion arises between the two authors. Elizabeth tries to perceive at least some reaction from his face, but “there is no sign she can detect, not at this distance, just a short man in black on his way to the coffee machine” (176). Costello escapes to the ladies’ room to once again ruminate her argument back and forth. She ponders the source of the nauseating energy of the description and concludes that it cannot be anyone other than West himself. She recalls how she did not want to read the book but West had forced her to do so by the sheer power of his narration. The problem of evil is thus a problem of writing as well. These ponderings lead her to an important self-reflection. She realizes that “she does the same thing, or used to do. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people’s faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal . . . as Hitler’s own

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man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle)” (179). Costello admits first her complicity of writing and speaking in the same way as West, and delves immediately into the thought again, subscribing to her old ideas but colored now by the work of Paul West. It is remarkable that Costello is just thinking, and not preaching. It is thus the narrator of the novel who commits himself to the faults of West. West is thus not just an adversary; rather, he is an integral aspect of the problematic of writing. Costello never meets West again, and she never learns of his reaction. The image is powerful: mute and unresponsive Paul West going to fetch his coffee, nervous and self-conscious Costello contemplating her talk in the shelter of the ladies’ room. This image leaves open the possibility that West indeed is touched by evil, knows the evil, and is unable to feel anything. Costello, on the other hand, tries to find the answer in the peace of the ladies’ room, thus finally missing the chance of dialogue. The image is also a perfect ending for the section on evil, accentuating the fact that whatever we try to do with trauma, a final peace and closure is inaccessible. From yet another angle, the image shows the power of focalization. We are invited to follow Costello’s inner thought but can only see the vacant exterior of Paul West. What would have been our conclusions if we had been able to see the possible turmoil and reflections inside West and met Costello again as a rigid speaker disappearing soon after her talk? The Reading Guidelines If the reader has not yet renounced his or her wish to attach Costello’s political statements to the author of the novel, the last lesson, At the Gate, makes the point even clearer. In this lesson, Elizabeth Costello tries to negotiate her way through in order to meet St. Paul, not St. Peter. The reader may at first assume that Elizabeth is indeed at the gate of heaven but is disappointed soon enough. Besides these few heavenly references, the setting is explicitly Kafkaesque and rather clichéd. The content of the repeated encounters with the gatekeepers and law court meetings is a statement of belief Elizabeth Costello is required to make in order to pass. “We all believe. We are not cattle,” maintains the guard. Elizabeth resorts to Aristotle and maintains that it “is not [her] profession to believe, just to write” (194). When Costello’s first statement is overlooked, she has to write another, where she says, “I am a writer, a trader of fictions, it says. I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I change my habitation or my cloths, according to my needs” (195). This unfeigned letter is of no help to excuse her of the responsibility of belief. She

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finds her situation far from elevated and rather recognizes elements of the gulag and Holocaust in her dormitory. Before the court, she offers a new formulation. She writes: “I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given to me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard them right” (199). She reiterates her point: in her line of work, “belief is a resistance, an obstacle” (200). Again, the judge challenges Costello’s whole humanity on the basis that she does not believe in anything. Here, Elizabeth’s retort is an elaboration of her position. She says, “To put it another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them” (200). This last specification is important. Elizabeth Costello does not maintain that she is entirely unlike the other humans; instead, she once again points toward the difference of her roles as citizen and writer. This is again to radicalize the contrast between Elizabeth-the-lecturer and Elizabeth-the-author. The judge eagerly takes the figure of “dictation secretary” and demands answers about the voices she hears. What about the murdered Tasmanian children, the almost annihilated people? Does she not hear their voices? Now the judge is taking a more cunning position as regards the ethics of writing. Costello has to admit that she can only dictate the voices she hears, nothing more. Then she offers an even more questionable remark, “A word of caution to you, however. I am open to all voices, not just the voices of the murdered and violated . . . If it is their murderers and violators who choose to summon me instead, to use me and speak through me, I will not close my ears to them, I will not judge them” (204). Costello has suddenly arrived problematically close to Paul West. If she hears the voice of a murderer, must she also “release the genie,” without hope of ever catching him again? Coetzee seems to accept the hearing of perpetrators, but not giving them the whole energy and vividness of trauma. In any case, Coetzee’s modest theory of writing seems to effectively cut short any easy connection between the author and the statements of the characters. The theory is by no means a literary whim, because similar ideas are recognizable in his Disgrace (1999) and Slow Man (2005). However, does this theory of writing as dictation undermine all attempts at political reading of the novel? This is not the case. The project of Elizabeth Costello is not simply to undermine and entirely erase Costello’s hectic talks. Recall Costello’s remark on method: “I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard them right” (199). Assuming that

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Costello indeed speaks here on behalf of Coetzee, the author brings, in a genuine democratic and civil meaning, the “true” voices around, as parts of the drama. He does not need to take a definite position, as a writer. Politically speaking, and on my analysis, the key theme of the novel is cruelty, and cruelty in its unending forms. Coetzee begins with the theme of cruelty against animals, knits it together with the worst possible cruelty against humans, but then turns the tables around to show how cruelty may be enacted by representing and circulating cruelty too graphically. Coetzee is undeniably a fierce critic of the cruelty enacted on animals, but, just as clearly, he outlines Costello’s politically sterile dogmatism in preaching her message. In presenting all of the story-world debates, the novel systematically resists easy mimetic identifications. From the early marks regarding realistic details to the postscript (“Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos”), the implied author keeps foregrounding the synthetic, textual function of the novel. How to write a novel; how to hear the voices; how to be politically and ethically responsible while writing; and how to speak about trauma are questions that the novel foregrounds repeatedly. The strongest ethos of the novel might ironically reside in listening, not in lecturing. Does the Kafkaesque lesson At the Gate demonstrate a pressure to have beliefs, opinions, solid identity, to commit to preaching a message? Do the guards not implicate that “belief ” is that which distinguishes us from “cattle”—from animals, and in this context, obviously from the Jews in the cattle car? The judges and guards accuse Elizabeth of cynicism, of course, because she does not volunteer to join the choir of having deep beliefs. In her erasure of firm identity and firm beliefs, she privileges the performance of the reader. She says, and here arguably reflecting the thoughts of the author, “On my humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect” (201). The point is no longer Costello’s humanity or virtuosity. What matters is the complex ethical and rhetorical performance of the novel and the ways readers react. Terror and trauma are not disease-like natural phenomena that could straightforwardly be represented and fought against; rather, such outraged reactions seem problematically to partake in the cultural circulation and expanding of trauma. The objectivistic and distanced approach of Paul West is ethically as questionable as Costello’s originally militant stance toward terror and trauma. The reign of terror may continue in discursive, textual forms, but these discursive struggles are vital in (re)defining something as terror. Coetzee uses the novelistic form, indeed the novel of ideas, to resist the wish for morally and politically absolute positions in regard to terror and

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cruelty. The dilemma, for a political scientist, is then to recognize this complex of narrative thinking, reevaluations, and erasures, and not merely to identify Elizabeth Costello’s early, militant declarations. References Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the theory of narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1961. The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coetzee, J. M. 2005. Slow man. London: Secker & Warburg. ———. 2004. Elizabeth Costello. London: Vintage. ———. 1999. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative discourse. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell. Original edition, “Discourse du Recit,” a portion of Figures III, Editions du Seuil 1972. Herman, David. 2002. Story logic: Problems and possibilities of narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ———. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martell, Yann. 2002. Life of Pi: A novel. Edinburgh: Cannongate. McEwan, Ian. 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative fiction. Contemporary poetics. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Runia, Eelco. 2004. “Forget about it”: “Parallel processing” in the Srebrenica Report. History and Theory 43 (3): 295–320. Updike, John. 2006. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

PART 3

Governmental Terror

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CHAPTER 8

Dictators and Dictatorships Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (1974–89)1 Caterina Preda

If politics is power, and art liberty, then art in a totalitarian state becomes not only a provocation—as it is for any authority, but no more, nor less than the enemy. —Manea 2005, 51

Introduction

S

eptember 11, 1973, La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace in Santiago, was bombed by military airplanes; smoke rose from the debris while democracy was annihilated. On December 22, 1989, the firstever televised revolution was aired; shots were fired as the last soviet satellite, Romania, collapsed. These two powerful images (and at the same time representations) made the tour of the world and marked international consciousness. They represent the beginning of one regime and the end of another. This chapter inquires into what happened between these two landmarks. And even more specifically, what occurred in these two regimes in respect to the relations between art and politics? The main research question of this chapter concerns the transformations of the artistic field in nondemocratic settings (both cultural policies and culture as resistance). The question is subdivided into two separate lines of investigation: What are the strategies of the two regimes in relation to the arts? And how does the artistic space react? These two questions cannot be entirely

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separated, however, as this study does not follow a cause-and-effect type of approach. The broad hypothesis is that a dictatorial regime affects the artistic field in similar ways; it always forbids those artistic expressions that are opposed to its imaginary and replaces them with expressions that are congruent with its own vision. The two regimes represent the extremes of imaginable studies concerning the relations between art and politics in nondemocratic configurations. Thus, in the first case—the Chilean one—the regime regarded the arts as a potentially dangerous environment and in consequence altered their articulations by means of several mechanisms: censorship, physical annihilation, in material terms, and by imposing an alternative culture; mass culture (with a preferred transmission means being that of television). Still, the Pinochet regime did not attribute a specific mission to the arts (except for the educational project set in place by the division of culture of the Ministry of Education); rather, it was satisfied to limit their impact and to control all access to them. In the second case, the Romanian regime decided to use the arts to consolidate its power, its view of the world. The arts had the task to create, and to do so in accordance with the ideological precepts; moreover, the artists were converted into workers with a five-year plan, whereby their creativity was to be coordinated and regulated, just as in all other domains of activity. The soul engineers were forced to pay a public tribute if they wanted to pursue their creative endeavors. A strong system of censorship assured that they would do so. I must specify that I am working with a very broad definition of the artistic field: on one side lies the institutional aspect (the role of the state), vis-àvis artistic expressions as such (the plastic arts and architecture, literature, cinema and theatre, music and dance). The state and the artistic field are, in this relation, hopelessly entangled; for example, in the architectural domain, the state plays an important role on the planning of public space (urbanization, statues, public parks, museums, etc.). While concentrating on visual arts (the plastic arts), given the different uses made by the regime and the characteristics of artistic expressions themselves (cinema is harder to produce clandestinely due to the high costs, but by the same token has a higher impact), the analysis will thus look at the entire sphere of artistic expression. While trying to offer a broader, more comprehensive picture of what art of the dictatorship and art under dictatorship meant in the two cases under analysis, the examples chosen represent the main tendencies or the most visible manifestations. The selection is, of course, arbitrary, but this is always true when one refers to artistic expressions that are by their very definition subjective (often

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metaphorical, they use symbols to describe the present they cannot portray directly). Moreover, in order to deploy our analysis, the first section seeks to first reconstruct the context by answering the broad double-question, what are the characteristics of the two regimes? and even more importantly, what are their main differences? In a later section, we will deal with the (dis)similarities of the two regimes discussed here in what relates to artistic developments. The Pinochet and Ceaus¸escu Regimes Mirrored In order to address the first question presented in the introduction (what are the strategies used by the regime in respect to the cultural sphere?), this section sets the framework by concentrating on the subquestion, what are the distinctive traits of the two regimes? The approach is twofold. On the one hand, we will look at the main features of the regimes (emphasizing the personalistic features of the two rulerships), and on the other hand, we will underline the type of relation they establish within the cultural sphere—with the arts at large. Besides the temporal coincidence, since we chose to analyze the two regimes in the period 1974 to 1989, we will look at a similar set of features. As such, we will decipher the type of regime (authoritarian versus totalitarian), and assess the degree of personalization of the regime, the extent to which they rely on terror to secure their regime, the opposed ideologies they profess and their exacerbated nationalism, the impact they have on society, and the economic model they impose. Finally, the end of their regimes is also compared. Table 8.1 recaptures these variables in a comparative view. In this manner, we will see that, even though they could both be characterized as modern dictatorships (authoritarian or totalitarian), the two case studies are different because their assumed and declared ambitions remain fundamentally divergent, contrasting. The September 11, 1973, coup d’etat in Chile brought to power a fourman military junta that created, as Collier and Sater noted, a “modern police state.” The two fundamental aims declared at the outset of the Pinochet regime were to destroy the Left and their collaborators, and engineer a fundamental restructuring of Chilean political institutions and political life (Valenzuela 1999, 222). The first purpose was achieved largely in the first year and thereafter repression extended to any divergent action or opinion, and not merely toward communists. The second goal of the regime, to amend the political configuration, was realized by first destroying the state organization and then replacing it with one conforming to the desired aims of the

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Table 8.1 Comparative view of the two regimes Variables Period of rule

Augusto Ugarte Pinochet 1973–89

Nicolae Ceau¸sescu 1965–891

Type of regime

Authoritarian with personalist features

Totalitarian with dynastic/ sultanistic features

Informal Anticommunism DINA/CNI Divided society: Economic breakthrough National Security doctrine Market logic Negotiation: Prosecuted & honored

Both formal and informal Communism Securitate Economic hardship & anemic society Independence from Moscow Central planning Violent rupture Executed

Personalization of power: Centralization Ideology Use of terror/fear Impact on society Nationalism Economy The end

1. Formally in power from 1965, Ceaus¸escu was elected first president of Romania in 1974.

regime. Thus, Congress was abolished, with the junta assuming the legislative power while the president of the junta was in charge of the executive power as supreme chief of the nation (Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda 2001, 42). The parties of the Unidad Popular (UP) were outlawed, while the others were suspended—until 1977 when they were also outlawed (Collier and Sater 1999, 307; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda 2001, 217). Furthermore, all national institutions, from universities to the football federation, were placed under the direct control of the military (Collier and Sater 1999, 307). Finally, the institutionalization of the regime was consecrated by the 1980 Constitution that safeguarded the enduring power of General Augusto Ugarte Pinochet. Conversely, upon the death of Romania’s first communist leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in March 1965, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was nominated first secretary of the Romanian Communist Party. The communist regime, established with the aid of the Soviets in 1947, had meanwhile witnessed the Stalinization of the country. This process achieved three ambitious purposes: in the first place, the economy was transformed into one that was centrally planned and state-owned through the nationalization of the primary means of production; in the second place, Stalinization also meant heavy industrialization and collectivization of agriculture; thirdly, it implied the imposition of a soviet blueprint on the cultural sphere: socialist realism. This is the setting in which Ceaus¸escu assumed power. Furthermore, his regime can be broken down into two periods, though not so clearly demarcated: 1965 to 1971, an apparent liberalization and the establishment of the myth of

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“national-communism” by his constant declarations of independence from Moscow, and 1971 to 1989, the beginning and then strengthening of a totalitarian dictatorship. Both dictators undertook the gradual centralization of political power. Thus, although the military junta was supposed to have had a rotating presidency, Pinochet gradually assumed the supreme position. Indeed, 1974 marks the year of his confirmation as president of the Chilean state.2 As of this date, Pinochet consolidated himself as the sole and exclusive leader, even if the junta was maintained at least formally. In contrast to Ceaus¸escu, who constructed a dynastic form of rulership, Pinochet constantly asserted his supreme power in opposition to other members of the regime (see, e.g., the plans for the 1980 Constitution). Gradually, Ceaus¸escu removed all his competitors and replaced them with “trustworthy” personnel. Apart from the intra-party consolidation of power, Ceaus¸escu commenced the “cultural revolution” following his 1971 journeys to Eastern Asia, especially those to China and North Korea, and began setting in place the dynastic or sultanistic mold by promoting his family to the highest ranks of the party and state. Thus, at the beginning, Ceaus¸escu created the “myth of the political reformer” (Tism˘aneanu 2003, 197) to distinguish himself from GheorghiuDej and give the illusion of liberalization for some years (1965–71). Thereafter, in the summer of 1971, Ceaus¸escu announced his famous “July theses” (Ceaus¸escu 1971), the prelude to the transformation of Romania into “Ceaus¸escu’s land.” Finally, in 1974, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was elected president of the Socialist Republic of Romania, thus becoming the first Romanian president (Kunze 2002, 288). Linz and Stepan note in this sense that the 1974 ceremony “mimicking coronation” completed “the fusion of all key parts and state roles” (Linz and Stepan 1996, 349). As mentioned earlier, Romania was transformed into a centrally planned economy in 1948. Ceaus¸escu did not alter this configuration. On the other hand, the Pinochet regime accompanied its refoundational project with a courageous economic endeavor. This plan was meant to reverse the persistent line of state interventionism developed in Chile since the 1920s and open up the economy, as well as impose the market model (Collier and Sater 1999, 313). Privatization of the major companies belonging to the state was undertaken immediately and, in 1975, a monetary reform was pursued by introducing a new currency, the peso, with a fixed rate of exchange against the dollar being added (Collier and Sater 1999, 314). This “shock treatment” triggered, at the beginning of the 1980s, a strong recession leading to the adoption of a different approach in the mid-1980s. The new strategy combined a “limited model of substitution of imports” (the traditional 1930s

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Latin American model) and the promotion of exports, leading to a new solid growth of the Chilean economy (Collier and Sater 1999, 317). As to the ideological level, the two regimes appeared to stand at opposite sides of the spectrum: on the one side, the Romanian communist regime with strong nationalistic accents, especially in the second period of Ceaus¸escu’s reign of power, and on the other, the Pinochet regime professing profound anticommunist sentiments and the salvation of Chile through an emphasis on the nationalist mold and on the traditional values. Strong nationalism is thus combined with two opposed ideological positions approached by the divergent regimes. The use of terror is undeniable in the two configurations. The establishment of the tragically famous Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), directly placed under the control of Pinochet, led the repression to unbearable heights.3 Following a series of international attacks under the transnational Operación Condor, DINA was dismantled in August 1977 and replaced with the Central Nacional de Información (CNI) that inherited the personnel of the former agency and continued, until the end of the regime, its infamous practices: murders, disappearances, and torture. In Romania, the Securitate (the General Direction of the People’s Security), created in August 1948, was, until the end of the Ceaus¸escu regime, the artisan behind a general sentiment of insecurity (through the systematic use of fear and terror, persecution, and by threat of the nonchoice of prison versus exile—interior and exterior), and of “national pessimism,” to use Vladimir Tism˘aneanu’s expression. As an effect of the action of these two parallel systems of fear, two types of societies were created. In the Romanian case, we can identify what Mary Fulbrook has labeled “participatory dictatorship” (in the case of the GDR), and at the other end of the spectrum, in Chile, we could depict an “exclusory dictatorship.” Fulbrook uses the notion of participatory dictatorship so as to “underline the ways in which the people themselves were at one and the same time both constrained and affected by, and yet also actively and often voluntarily carried, the ever changing social and political system of the GDR” (2005, 12). A different logic reigned under Pinochet: the declared aim of the regime was to purge Chilean society of all political influence, especially pertaining to the communist ideology but not restricted to it; this ranged from purging all institutions of the left-wingers, dismantlement of all cultural activities (both institutionally and physically by repressing the “opponents”) or of certain professions. By means of exclusion and prohibition (forbiddance), the Pinochet regime tried to consolidate an apolitical dictatorship, transforming paradoxically any act into a politically articulated one.

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The two regimes end in different manners, although the date is the same, 1989. In Chile, by the 1980 Constitution, Pinochet assumed the first mandate of president (1981–89), following which, in 1988, a referendum established whether or not he was to remain in power for another eight years (1989–97). The 1988 referendum, however, rejected by a margin of 54 percent his duration in power. Pinochet nonetheless safeguarded, until 1997, his role as commander in chief of the armed forces and afterwards gained immunity through a mandate as senator for life. At his death in December 2006, half of Chile celebrated, while the other half mourned the loss of one of its greatest leaders. The Romanian regime, by contrast, was the last domino of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe to fall in December of 1989. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was tried in a furtive manner and thereafter executed on Christmas day. Two Differing Strategies? The Institutional Framework and Cultural Policies The two models analyzed here conform paradoxically to the two paradigmatic types of modern art, art for art (aesthetic autonomy) and committed art (art at the service of the political, as a reflection of it). In the one case, the state coerces the artist to create conformingly to the ideological precepts and, in the other case, the state is absent—it imagines no specific political project intended for the arts (it does not seek to be portrayed by the arts; rather, it has a vision of the arts), it contents itself to control them/safeguard a cleansed society (cleansed of all political allusion). In fact, the Pinochet regime implicitly associated the arts with politics and chose to support aesthetic academism. Moreover, it appears that the two political projects illustrate the extremes of state-policies directed toward the arts: an omnipresent (Romania) and a quasi absent state (Chile). Starting from the two classic models—the North American (United States) free market model and the French welfare state model—we can see how, in a dictatorial setting, two strategies imagined by the state are set in place. These two models match the aforementioned dynamics of modern art: art is set free of any interventionism (pure art) and art is dominated by the state. A comparison of the state cultural policies thought to suit the goals of the political regime, in the two cases, shows us that in Romania there was centralization. All artistic manifestations were placed under the control of a central authority whereas in Chile, the policy was one of diffusion: the lack of a

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unified policy stemming from the government and leading to cultural subdevelopment (Henríquez Moya 2004). As such, in the Romanian case, there is a triad/totalitarian triangle of the state-party artists that had complete control over all artistic creations (Cârneci 2001, 20). The same applies to the situation of writers, filmmakers, musicians, and architects; in 1947, the “communist cultural revolution” was set by the Congress of the Union of Trade-Unions of Artists, Writers, and Journalists. From then on, art was placed under the control of the state and was declared to be an ideological arm, an instrument of political power (Cârneci 2001, 17). So, was the background setting of the Ceaus¸escu regime identical to that which ushered in the communist rule in Romania? Formally yes, but the subsequent evolution and the timid artistic liberalization of the late 1960s to the early 1970s was annulled by the July 1971 theses of Ceaus¸escu that triggered the “mini-cultural revolution” à la Roumaine. Artists were suddenly assigned new tasks that they had to achieve; moreover, they had to create fully in the spirit of the “multilaterally developed society” (Romania became a closed society, where artists could hardly know what happened in the western hemisphere or, even less, travel or exchange ideas with foreign colleagues). There is a generally accepted conclusion that the Pinochet regime did not imagine a clearly defined project regarding the role the arts should play, what functions they should assume (Brunner, Garretón). The policy adopted would be a negative one, based on interdictions and exclusions (the regime denies, forbids). Though there existed an initial program of cultural content and a certain preoccupation relating to the artistic space, the Pinochet government only proclaimed intentions (Política cultural del Gobierno, 1975) that remained at the project stage and that was not concretized within a specific policy. During the Pinochet regime, there was continuity in the actions of the government concerning artistic creation, more precisely, in the sense of artistic extension as a constant policy of the Ministry of Education but also in the sense of the development of an apolitical art—a function delegated by the regime to the private companies, in accordance with the impetus that the market model imposed. Despite this negative type of project, in the approach of the Pinochet regime, a number of ideological references and tendencies can be identified: nationalism looking to refound Chile on the basis of the original principles, those of the Portalian Republic (conservatism—traditional Catholicism and National Security Doctrine); neoliberalism promoting the market as the unique articulator of artistic expressions; and finally a mass(-ive) culture-oriented policy supported by the market, but also promoted by the state (television is

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controlled by the state by nomination of military personnel as rectors of the universities that own the television channels). Additionally, the anti-Marxist obsession, manifested especially in the first period but present all throughout the regime, is associated with the Doctrine of National Security. Parallel Artistic Radiographies: Chile and Romania The difference in the accents placed by the political regime on specific means of artistic dissemination has to be taken into account in this somehow asymmetrical comparison as can be seen from Table 8.2. First are the visual arts. They see the deployment of three distinct general directions in the two spaces. In Chile, an official “academism” is allowed and encouraged by the regime (art for art, purified of any politics) and at the same time, leftist artists develop a critical, dissenting imaginary directly linked with the previous Unidad Popular (UP) model; moreover, another type of discourse emerges from the opposition, a visual discourse contesting the dictatorship from a distinct position, other than the leftist/Marxist one—“Escena de Avanzada.”4 The Escena de avanzada is a critical approach questioning the significance of art in an extremely repressive society (Richard 1987, 1). A critical view of society emerges from this new direction taken by the visual arts. Some of the visual arts projects depart from the testimonial realm and are connected to the actions of the humanitarian agencies promoting a visibility of the unseen desaparecidos. Art thus promotes a rupture with the institutionalism imposed by the regime. Under the Ceaus¸escu regime, in the period analyzed here (1974–89), we have a different collage: on the one side, there is a strong and sustained development of a visual imaginary with propagandistic purposes (chiefly developing Table 8.2 Comparative view of artistic manifestations

Visual arts Architecture Literary works Cinema Music Classical Popular “Modern” Theater National festivals TV & radio

Romania Proregime Antiregime 1 1/1 1 – 1 1 1 1 (censored) 1 1 1 soft pop 1 1 1

0 0 1/rock 0 1 0

Chile Proregime 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1

Antiregime 1 – 1 1 (exile) 0 1 1/rock 1 1 (nueva canción) 1

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an image of the leader and his immediate family). Secondly, we have a “claimed as” apolitical art associated with those creators that refuse to pay a tribute to the regime. In between there is a mixed response of those artists that pay their dues to the regime (being obliged to or by way of opportunism), who continue their artistic endeavors independent of the official policies. Thus, for the Romanian visual arts scene, there were three main types of artistic creation: official(ized), independent (art for art), and another in between the previous two, blending them. A specificity of the Romanian case is centered, in the opinion of Adrian Cioroianu, on the “videology” of Ceaus¸escu; that is, on the “ideology that tends gradually but unavoidably to resume to the exhibition of the same effigies, to the display of an only portrait” (Cioroianu 2006, 251). This “obsession of the self-portrait”5 led to the repetition of the same idealized image of the leader. This series of paintings was in fact far from the realistic representations proclaimed by the communist regime: artists did not have the privilege of having Ceaus¸escu pose for them, rather, they used already altered photos of the leader and, in the same time, falsified his image by trying to conceal his physical defects (Cioroianu 2006, 251). The propagandistic rhetoric was identical in the case of Ceaus¸ escu with that of Stalin or Mao. Thus, the leader is represented as being bigger than all the other persons in the painting (see Mao’s representations6), where his face is smiling and luminous, and the personages are usually floating above all others, thereby resembling gods or semigods. Second is architecture. In this domain, the Ceaus¸escu regime imagines and sets in place a totalitarian project by altering the way people lived and worked (and, in accordance with the unachieved projects, ate). The systematization plan included both the razing of villages (and sought to modify traditional lodging of peasants and the creation of cities instead) and also the (re)imagining of the cities by destroying the traditional architecture and replacing it with uniform blocks of apartments. The most infamous accomplishment of this project was the Civic Center complex that included the sadly celebrated People’s House. Conversely, in Chile, the capital city of Santiago was also transformed by the Pinochet regime. The booming economy led to the creation of a new neighborhood, “the place everybody wants to live in,” Sanhattan. The skyscrapers of Sanhattan are the living symbol of the success obtained by a part of Chilean society. A similar project to the one of the People’s House is in Chile the new congressional building of Valparaíso, “a combination of neobabylonic and postmodernism” (Collier and Sater 1999, 325), which Pinochet left as a heritage for the new democracy. The restored Congress he

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abolished now has to move between Santiago—the seat of government—and Valparaíso. Third are literary works. Because of the important number of exiled writers, Chilean literature of the period designates two spaces: literature in exile and the literature inside the country. The literature of the exiled contained, especially in the beginning, an important number of testimonial texts or fiction departing from testimonies. The literature in Chile was itself divided into the new line imposed by the regime that installed its own competitions and official prizes on the one hand and the literature of the opposition, on the other (Jofre 1989, 79). Moreover if, in the first stage, certain books and select authors were purged from libraries and then forbidden, and bookstores were driven to bankruptcy (Jofre 1989, 79), in a second stage, an important and prohibitive tax of 20 percent for any book publication was imposed. Thus, publishing houses had nothing to print and were forced to close, bookstores rarely had anything to sell and also had to shut their doors, and7 authors that survived the censorship could only use artisan-like modes of editing and distribution. Furthermore, there was an important increase in the importation of foreign books, as well as an increase in the selling of magazines that offered promotional books (by means of television ads); book consumption thus acquired a different visage (Brunner and Catalán 1985, 34–35). Romanian literary works, for their part, could be divided into three categories: in the first category there were those works that followed party lines and glorified the regime and its leader and adopted the new esthetic imposed by the multilaterally developed society. The second category included the writers who used a double-sense language and who either managed to slip past the censorship or, then, did not (see, in this sense, the testimony of Norman Manea and his negotiations with the censors). In the last category, we can place apolitical works that, likewise, surpassed censorship (the works of Nichita Sta˘nescu, for example). The new line imposed by Ceaus¸escu following the “1971 July theses” was enforced on the literary world and, starting from 1981, the Writers Union ceased to hold meetings, with the opposition inside it thereby being annihilated. Writers could not contest the regime, albeit in their internal forum; they had to comply or cease to create. Fourth is cinema and theater. Not even before the 1973 coup was Chilean cinema an important industry. Afterwards, though, it became even less important (in spite of aborted projects aiming at creating national epopees). Thus, in the period 1974 to 1984, only four commercial films were broadcasted (and thirteen films exhibited in the art-circuit), while there was an increase in the production of television ads and music videos (most of the actors and directors that remained in Chile were redirected toward these two

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new fields; Brunner and Catalán 1985, 41). Conversely, the cinema in exile (the most important directors having left the country) produced around ninety films in the same period with such works as It Rains on Santiago (Helvio Soto), The Calm Reigns in All the Country (Pether Lilienthal and Antonio Skarmeta), or The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman; Sarget 1996, 256). Most of the important cinematographic creations of the period were thus found not inside the country, but among the works of the exiled directors. Finally, there was an important decrease in cinematographic consumption in favor of television. Romanian cinema, for its part, developed in an important manner with such preferred subjects as grand historic dramas (e.g., Mihai Viteazul), personalized socialist dramas and comedies, or moralizing film series (such as the hit cinema series portraying Commissar Moldovan). Likewise in Romania, there were certain directors that could choose exile so as to gain artistic freedom—such as Lucian Pintilie, whose 1971 film Reconstituirea (Reconstitution) was censored. Chilean theater was also affected by the institutional dismantling: theater schools and companies were simply closed down. The regime later imposed a return to classic theater and all references to contemporary Chile were suppressed (Jofre 1989, 78). Independent theater thereafter developed in two directions: commercial comedies (café-concert); and a critical approach to the dictatorship, a means by which to transmit the malaise of the disadvantaged (testimonial theater; Jofre 1989, 78). In Romania, no private theater companies could be created whatsoever; indeed, all artistic creation in this sphere was dominated and controlled by state policy. Apart from theatrical oeuvres portraying the life inside the factory, or in the villages (and the development of artistic creations stemming from amateurs), a classic repertory was tolerated. During performances, however, actors could nonetheless slip past censorship (besides preliminary censorship, at each presentation there was also a censor in the theater hall) by introducing lizards (the term designating the political allusions in the double language) of the texts. The fifth is music and national festivals. A common preferred means of artistic expression was, in both cases, the organization of national festivals (Cântarea României versus Festival de Viña) with a quite pronounced autochthonic and nationalistic twist promoting folklore and popular culture. Moreover, the articulation of these state-controlled artistic manifestations was imagined so as to provide an alternative to the “subversive” cultural productions and, simultaneously, to the Western influences as well. Conversely,

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music as resistance is visible in the two spaces. In the Chilean case, this type of music is visible both inside the country and in exile (perhaps the most famous musicians of the period, performing in exile, include Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún). Moreover, Chile had an important precoup local tradition combining social and political protest songs with folklore in the form of la nueva cancion chilena,8 later developing into the canto nuevo. In the Romanian case, we find similar manifestations in the songs of Phoenix and the allusive songs of Alexandru Andries¸.9 Moreover, in the Chilean case, adjacent to the contestation coming from the nueva canción, a different type of opposition to the regime appears, one that pertains to the youth and that was most felt in music groups like Los Prisonieros, the most well-known group of its kind. This generation contested the regime, but did not identify with the peñas or the folkloric manifestations. Sixth is television and radio. Though not strictly considered as a means of artistic expression, television and radio as important means of mass communication are also taken into consideration here. The Pinochet regime, through the market model it imposed, completely modified the way in which Chileans articulated their lives. Furthermore, through the state of emergency and the nocturnal curfew (almost permanent during the seventeen years of dictatorship), Chileans were confined to their homes having a sole means of escape: television. The generalization of television (the national channels covered almost 90 percent of the territory and there was a television set in almost every home) did not reflect the surrounding reality for it offered for the most part entertainment programs (contests, shows, and soap operas), which, in turn, led to the alteration of the logic of sociability of Chileans (Brunner and Catalán 1987, 21). Chilean television reflected one reality, the one the regime acquiesced to. If, in Chile, the Pinochet regime’s preferred channel for the official culture was television, in Romania, the television was restricted to the two hours of daily news programming that, every evening, presented the new accomplishments of the people and, most of all, presented those of the leader himself, Ceaus¸escu. It is interesting to note in this sense that, as opposed to the restricted television programs, the official radio channel transmitted uninterruptedly. In the Romanian case, it also has to be taken into account that the Munich-based Radio Free Europe, sponsored by the American State Department, marked public consciousness in the 1980s. Romanians could usually find out what was happening inside the country by listening to its transmissions from Munich.

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Conclusion Our brief inquiry presented a set of considerations that allow the comparison of two artistic spaces modified by two modern dictatorships, those of General Pinochet and Ceaus¸escu. The two regimes are found to exist on opposing sides on more than one coordinate. From an ideological point of view, it can easily be seen that the Pinochet regime relied on an ideological sum of principles such as the supreme market logic, a national security doctrine, and a combination of traditional and national values. The Ceaus¸escu regime, on the other hand, departing from communism (and its cultural version, socialist realism) imposed a new model: that of the cult of the leader (and later of the dictatorial couple) combined with a strong nationalist variable. From the economic point of view (and its impact on the arts), we find, on the one side, a declared intent to impose a market model on the entire societal corpus, and on the other side, we have the stated aim to enforce up to the extremes a totally controlled state model. Insofar as common traits can be identified, it can be said that both rulers gradually abandoned the principle of collegiality that marked each of their departure points. They both assumed the supreme titles of president and commander in chief of their nations in 1974. In addition, a higher or lower degree of personalization of power can be traced in both cases. Moreover, the two dictators rely on the secret police to consolidate their hold on power and to eliminate their adversaries, as well as to maintain a general sentiment of fear. It would thus appear that the two who “would have been adversaries” find themselves mirrored here. Nonetheless, though situated at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, these two regimes are paradigmatic in support of the hypothesis announced at the beginning of this essay: a dictatorial setting replaces the cultural expressions with manifestations that conform to its political imaginary. Even if their strategies as well as the reactions they trigger differ, they are comparable. Thus, if the Ceaus¸escu regime set out to create a homogenous artistic sphere where any creation was to follow the official guidelines, it did not accomplish its goal since artists first paid their public tribute and then, afterwards, dedicated themselves to their artistic endeavors in a private sphere. It can be said, nonetheless, that by the consolidation of the myth of permanence, the regime dissuaded any type of opposition, “national pessimism” becoming the norm that defined the endless horizon. In its project of political cleansing and reorganization, the regime of Pinochet included the artistic space. Accordingly, this was first purged of any influence that could be traced back to communism or any variant of leftist ideology. In a second stage, all state subsidies were cut and the market model was imposed. Furthermore, a consumer type of culture was created—having as its official channel television. The arts were

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separated from society at large and began creating an alternative space where they contested the imposed model. By trying to annihilate the artistic opposition, the Pinochet regime encouraged (albeit involuntarily) a critical space that was ultimately used by the political opposition. The dimensions of the absurd that this type of dictatorial regime engenders are hardly quantifiable. What this type of study attempts is to merely recollect the images, the fragments of imagined worlds, and the sounds of two parallel time sequences (and spaces) that are found to coincide in the fine nuances and to place them in a political science perspective, hopefully giving rise to new patterns and ways of processing this genre of terror at the level of the society at large. References Bianchi, Soledad. 1982. La política cultural oficialista y el movimiento artístico. Araucaria 17: 135–41. Brunner, José J., and Carlos Catalán. 1987. Industria y mercado culturales en Chile: Descripción y cuantificación. Santiago: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO). ———. 1985. Cinco estudios sobre cultura y sociedad. Santiago: FLACSO. Castellanos, Jorge, and Miguel A. Martinez. 1981. El dictador hispanoamericano como personaje literario. Latin American Research Review 16 (2): 79–105. Cavallo, Ascanio, Manuel Salazar, and Oscar Sepúlveda. 2001. La historia oculta del régimen militar. Memoria de una época 1973–1988. Santiago: Mitos Bolsilllo, Grijalbo Mondadori. Câmpeanu, Pavel. 2002. Ceaus¸eescu, anii num˘ara˘torii inverse. Ias¸i: Polirom. Cârneci, Magda. 2001. Artele plastice în România 1945–1989. Bucures¸ti: Editura Meridiane. Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae. 1971. Propuneri de ma˘suri pentru îmbuna˘ta˘¸tirea activit˘¸ atii politico-ideologice, de educare marxist-leninist˘a a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii, Expunere la Consf˘atuirea de lucru a activului de partid din domeniul ideologiei s¸i al activit˘a¸tii politice ¸si cultural-educative, July 6, 1971. Bucure¸sti: Editura Politic˘a. Cernat, Paul, Ion Manolescu, Angelo Mitchievici, and Ioan Stanomir. 2005. Explor˘ari în comunismul românesc 2. Ia¸si: Polirom. Cioroianu, Adrian. 2006. “Videologia” lui Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Conduc˘atorul s¸i obsesia autoportretului. In Comunism ¸si represiune în România, ed. Ruxandra Cesereanu, 251–65. Ia¸si: Polirom. ———. 2005. Ce Ceaus¸escu qui hante les Roumains. Les mythes, les représentations et le culte du Dirigeant dans la Roumanie communiste. Bucarest: Editions Curtea Veche. Collier, Simon, and William F. Sater. 1999. Historia de Chile 1808–1994. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Contardo, Oscar, and Macarena García. 2005. La era ochentera. Tevé, pop y under en el Chile de los ochenta. Santiago: Ediciones B. Deletant, Dennis. 1998. Romania under Communist Rule. Bucures¸ti: Civic Academy Foundation. Dragomir, Lucia. 2004. “L’écrivain de parti” L’Ecole de Littérature et Critique littéraire “Mihai Eminescu.” Studia Politica 4 (4): 873–84. Fulbrook, Mary. 2005. The people’s state: East German society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Garretón, Manuel, Saúl Sosnowski, and Bernardo Subercaseaux. 1993. Cultura, autoritarismo y redemocratización en Chile. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Henríquez Moya, Rodrigo A. 2004. 30 años de políticas culturales: Los legados del autoritarismo. Sepiensa (October 21), http://www.sepiensa.cl/edicion/index.php ?option=content&task=view&id=174&Itemid=40 (accessed January 20, 2007). Hurtado, María de la Luz, and Carlos Ochsenius. 1979/1980. Transformaciones del teatro chileno en la década del ‘70. Santiago: Centro de Indagación y Expresión Cultural y Artística (CENECA). Ivelic, Milan, and Gaspar Galaz. 1988. Chile, arte actual. Valparaiso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso. Jofre, Manuel Alcides. 1989. Culture, art and literature in Chile: 1973–1985. Latin American Perspectives 16 (2): 70–95. Kunze, Thomas. 2002. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. O biografie. Bucures¸ti: Editura Vremea. Linz, Juan J. 2000. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Manea, Norman. 2005. Dictatorul ¸si artistul. Ia¸si: Polirom. Min, Anchee, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger. 2003. Chinese propaganda posters. Köln: Taschen. Morris, Nancy. 1986. Canto porque es necesario cantar: The new song movement in Chile, 1973–1983. Latin American Research Review 21 (2): 117–36. Negash, Girma. 2004. Art invoked: A mode of understanding and shaping the political. International Political Science Review 25 (2): 185–201. Negrici, Eugen. 2006. Literatura român˘a sub communism. Proza. Bucures¸ti: Editura Fundat¸iei Pro. Neustadt, Richard. 2001. CADA DIA: La creación de un arte social. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Oprea, Marius. 2006. L’Héritage de la Securitate: Terreur en Roumanie 1952–2002. In Le Jour se lève. L’héritage du totalitarisme en Europe 1953–2005, ed. Stephane Curtois, 240–54. Paris: Editions du Rocher. Petcu, Marian. 1999. Puterea ¸si cultura. O istorie a cenzurii. Ias¸i: Polirom. Pintilie, Ileana. 2000. Act¸ionismul în România în timpul comunismului. Cluj: Idea Design & Print.

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Richard, Nelly, ed. 1987. Arte en Chile desde 1973. Escena de avanzada y sociedad. Santiago: FLACSO. Richard, Nelly. 1994. La insubordinación de los signos. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Sarget, Marie-Noëlle. 1996. Histoire du Chili de la conquête à nos jours. Paris: L’Harmattan. Tisma˘neanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for all seasons: A political history of Romanian communism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ute Gabanyi, Aneli. 2003. Cultul lui Ceaus¸escu. Ias¸i: Polirom. Valenzuela, Arturo. 1999. Chile: Origins and consolidation of a Latin American democracy. In Democracy in developing countries. Latin America. 2nd ed. Larry Diamond et al., 191–247. Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Reiner.

Notes 1. This article represents a resumé of the theme of my doctoral dissertation prepared at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Science, to be submitted in October 2008. 2. Decree No. 806 designated as president of the Republic, the President of the Junta, chief of the executive and supreme chief of the nation (Cavallo et al. 2001, 90). 3. Such was the case with the Estadio Nacional, one of the main places of detention during the first months. The other “landmark” of the repression was Villa Grimaldi, one of the most important sites of imprisonment and torture in the capital of Santiago. The international attacks were perpetrated against the exiled Gen. Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires (September 1974), the failed attack against Bernardo Leighton, ex-chief of the Christian Democrats in Rome (October 1975), and the assassination of Allende’s ex-ambassador to Washington, Orlando Letelier (September 1976). 4. The term “Escena de Avanzada” is associated with the art critic Nelly Richard (see Richard 1987). 5. Cioroianu observes that all the artistic representations of Ceaus¸escu’s cult seem as if the Conduca˘tor would have painted them himself, if only he would have known how (see Cioroianu 2006, 251). 6. See, e.g., the album: Chinese Propaganda Posters, 2003, Köln: Taschen. 7. Interview with Manuel Alcides Jofre, November 21, 2006, Santiago de Chile. 8. The symbols of Victor Jara, assassinated in September 1973, and of Violeta Parra are still important in Chile nowadays and were the milestones of this new direction in Chilean music. 9. Listen for example to “La Telejurnal” (from 1980) or “Mie mi-e somn” (from 1983) included in the album Interzis (Forbidden), released immediately after 1990. The album is characterized by the author himself as a “collection of anticommunist follies”; see http://alexandries.free.fr.

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CHAPTER 9

Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control Chinese Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) Minna Valjakka

Introduction

T

his chapter focuses on how propaganda posters were used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the means of effective governmental control during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Most of the propaganda posters do not include images of terror but, on the contrary, overtly beautiful and happy moments of life. Despite this, however, the posters engendered traumatic experiences and fear among people. Therefore, I suggest that aside from the posters’ main task in serving as an obvious means of effective governmental control, they also provoked mental terror among people. As a result, they can be seen as a weapon of governmental terrorism employed against its own people. Definitions of terror and terrorism are often complex and even controversial. For example, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states on its Web site that UN Member States have not yet agreed on their definition of terrorism (UNODC 2007). In short, “terror” is usually meant in terms of an emotional state expressing extreme fear; as a result, “terrorism” is synonymous with “system of terror” (Waciorski 1939, 24–31; in Crenshaw Hutchinson 1972, 383). Sometimes, terrorism is seen as just an act of violence, but in a broader sense, it is usually seen as a systematic method of

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action, including violence or the threat of violence used to create fear in an audience for political purposes (Crenshaw Hutchinson 1972, 385). It can be employed by an individual, a certain group, or by governmental actors. For example, according to UNODC, an academic consensus defining terrorism is as follows: Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby—in contrast to assassination—the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought. (Schmid 1988 on the UNODC Web site; Schmid 1988, 28)

Physical acts of terror, acts of violence, are just one form of propaganda, which aims to achieve political goals. In China, state propaganda directed toward the people was manifested mainly through the arts. Especially during the Cultural Revolution, omnipresent propaganda posters were an effective system used to manipulate the masses. As Evans and Donald state, posters “are graphic reminders of mass insecurity, arbitrary violence, and personal trauma.” Furthermore, they tentatively mention the possibility that posters might even endow terror to everyday life (Evans and Donald 1999, 5, 10). In this chapter, I will argue that by subjugating recipients continuously to didactic visual communication, posters clearly engendered psychological chaos and terror among the people. With the aid of historical research, I will discuss the relationship between the CCP and the arts, which was officially formed in the beginning of the 1940s. This historical background is the prerequisite for the later usage of propaganda posters. Secondly, my aim is to clarify how propaganda posters were used as effective governmental control during the Cultural Revolution. The main questions focus on what subject matter they depicted and, most importantly, how they depicted it. Furthermore, I will discuss the kind of reactions these posters provoked among people. I suggest that the propaganda posters fostered chaos and mental terror employing the four main topics they depicted: Chairman Mao, agitation, socialist utopia, and heroic models. Thirdly, I will briefly show what effects art had on artists themselves

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during and after the Cultural Revolution. For example, what was their situation as professional artists? Finally, I will briefly discuss how the government’s terror against its own people is actually visible in the art after the Cultural Revolution. Traumatic experiences of those chaotic years are depicted especially in literature, but also in the visual arts termed scar art (shanghen yishu). Visual and Theoretical Background Using art as a tool of propaganda and as a governmental tool by the CCP since the 1940s was not a new phenomenon. It has its roots in Chinese traditional thinking based on Confucius (551–479 BCE) and the philosopher Mencius (372–289 BCE) such that people can be educated through the intervention of positive role models. This idea about cultivating people with positive examples has been used in China since the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220CE) when Confucianism was developed into the official state ideology (Landsberger 1995, 18–19). Communists started to enhance the relationship between the arts and politics already in the 1920s when they set up a department of propaganda to control all cultural activities. During the Yan’an period (1936–45), the Party systematically used different forms of art to propagate its ideology among the people. The development of propaganda poster art is based on the traditional wood block prints, which have been used for different purposes since the Tang dynasty (618–907). New Year pictures (nianhua), which were one of the most important forms of folk art, had the most significant influence on poster art. New Year pictures reflected the collectiveness and traditional values in society and they were very popular in the countryside. Besides, New Year pictures were easily understood by illiterate peasants, which was the main target group of the Party’s political message. Therefore they presented a very tempting tool in promoting the Party’s ideology. Furthermore, these woodblock prints were easily and cheaply produced in large numbers, which made them attainable even in poor areas (Landsberger 1995, 21–23, 33–34; Galikowski 1998, 3–6, 24–29). Poster art is also clearly influenced by the emergence of the New Woodcut Movement, which reflected the unsatisfactory situation of the society in the late 1920s and 1930s. This movement was promoted by a Shanghainese artist-writer, Lu Xun, who aimed to combine the Western wood block techniques and styles with traditional Chinese styles. In 1937 in Yan’an, the Lu Xun Academy of Art (Lu Xun Yishu Xueyuan) was established to develop and promote the Party’s ideas of arts. In the academy, an even more provocative style was developed in response to the war against Japan (1937–45). The arts

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were used to depict the cruelty of Japanese soldiers in order to encourage people to resist the occupation. However, the agitation-inciting, Western-influenced woodcuts did not appeal to the peasants. As a consequence, in the 1940s, the style of the pictures was renewed, indeed, to be made appropriate for use as propaganda. This new, more easily acceptable style combined the visual and compositional elements from New Year pictures with the more realistic expressions of woodblock prints, which finally pushed aside the expressionist style of the 1930s (see, e.g., Laing 1988, 9–15; Landsberger 1995, 22–23, 33–34; Andrews 1994, 16–18). As mentioned, the CCP used the art as a powerful tool to promote the revolution right from the beginning. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework of the arts was not set until 1942 when Mao Zedong clearly defined the role of the arts in his speeches at the Yan’an forum on literature and art (Mao 1967, 1–44; see also Chang 1980, 5–7; Galikowski 1998, 5, 21): In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels on the whole revolutionary machine. Therefore, Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period. (Mao 1967, 25)

According to Mao, the aim of the forum was “to ensure that revolutionary literature and art follow the correct path of development and provide better help to other revolutionary work in facilitating the overthrow of our national enemy and the accomplishment of the task of national liberation” (1967, 1). More interestingly, the aim was also “to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind” (2). These statements include verbal violence and, more significantly, clearly define the arts as powerful weapons. They incorporated violence in the arts and fashioned it to serve politics. This definition set the main requirements for appropriate art and was the most important guideline until the death of Mao in 1976. Accordingly, art was to be closely related to politics, serve the masses, and depict the real life of the people—but in an idealistic, exquisite style. The life of the people was the only true source for the arts, but should rather be more vividly expressed

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than real life. The aim was the unity of ideological content and the perfection of artistic expression. This meant that, although the political meaning was the most important requirement in art, the artistic values should not be underestimated since an artistically unqualified work did not have an ability to express the meanings (see, e.g., Mao 1967, 30; Galikowski 1998, 5, 21–24; Chang 1980, 7–8). The CCP’s theory of art was influenced by the socialist realism from the Soviet Union. The Marxist view of art is based on the theory of reflection, consisting of two aspects. Firstly, art is meant to depict the objects in a very detailed, scientific likeness; in other words, they were to produce a mirror image of the real object. This approach is “material realist.” Secondly, the aim of art is to produce a mirror image of an ideal world, not the material world. This approach is “objective idealism,” which is based on Plato’s idea of universal form. As a result, socialist realism is an outcome of these two approaches: a reflection of the materialistic world combined with idealistic elements, bright colors, and dramatic compositions. Socialist realist art in China followed the art in the Soviet Union. Art was clearly used to combine the present day’s reality while following the future’s ideals (Galikowski 1998, 37–39). After this initial phase, when the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, a new phase in the relationship between art and politics was begun. The two fundamental objectives of the Party were to legitimate and maintain its power and enlist the artists to participate in the continuing process of socialist revolution. Most of the artworks since 1949 are political, although not all the art was socialist realist. The monotony of artworks was also criticized and artists tried to promote the usage of different styles. Unfortunately, the subject matters were reiterated and artworks became poor in both quality and expression (Galikowski 1998, 9–10, 37–41; Laing 1988, 20–23). An essential aspect in the relationship between the Party and art was the total control it exercised over the artists. The three main domains of control were organizational structures, ideological scheme, and political and ideological movements. During the years 1956 to 1966, uncertainty was the dominating feature among artists and intellectuals. The Party’s policy was constantly changing with different campaigns, which was marked by significant fluctuations in the relationship between artists and authorities. The most effective change according to propaganda posters was the Great Leap Forward campaign, which was launched in 1958 to promote production. This campaign strongly affected the arts and artists, which were strictly governed by the Party. Art was produced directly for political needs. “Amateur artists” were promoted to the most important roles in art production, which stressed

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quantity and “popularization.” After the Great Leap Forward, the situation calmed down temporarily and the mass production of art was reduced. In any case, already in 1962 the atmosphere had begun to tighten up once again and this attitude gradually strengthened until the total political control over art during the Cultural Revolution (Galikowski 1998, 78–114). Propaganda Posters during the Cultural Revolution The official objective of the Cultural Revolution was to question the traditional structures and hierarchies of the society. In attacking the “Four Olds” (old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old practices), people were encouraged to renew society. The aim was to remove the privileged status of the intellectuals and the leaders of the Party. Chairman Mao’s concern about the neglect of the revolutionary cause was stated as an official reason for the campaign. In reality it was engendered by a power struggle within the Party itself. Mao Zedong, together with Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, tried to oust the other leaders. In support of this struggle, propaganda posters (xuanchuanhua) were produced with amazing speed and in large quantities. Oil paintings, aquarelles, and photographs were made into posters and several versions of the same picture were created. Posters were visible everywhere: in factories, offices, streets, homes, classrooms, meetings, and so on. Furthermore, the posters were reproduced in different forms. For example, they were reprinted in newspapers, magazines, and even as postage stamps. Posters were also copied and painted onto the walls as wall paintings, which were changed and repainted according to the campaign in question (Evans and Donald 1999, 1–3; Andrews 1994, 316; Gittings 1999, 27; Landsberger 2003, 16). As a result, posters dominated the visual sphere. People everywhere were continuously ongoing targets of the government’s didactic visual communication. In fact, visual arts served as the main media for creating images and idols for the masses. The posters’ main purpose was to provide examples of politically correct behavior, to educate people about current campaigns. This didactic function was embedded in all the posters. The main goals of the posters were strictly utilitarian and abstract: to glorify work and personal sacrifice for the common good (Landsberger 2003, 16). In practice, posters simultaneously promoted many practical themes, such as education, hygiene, production, technology, and so on. In consequence, posters were produced on various themes and in different styles, and they are not as homogenous as is commonly thought (Evans and Donald 1999, 3).

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On the other hand, several model books for creating appropriate posters were produced (Gittings 1999, 32). These drawing manuals are one reason for the similar appearance and likeness between pictures. For example, exactly the same person can be found in posters that were printed in different places and times (see, e.g., pictures in Landsberger 1995, 57). Previous researches have analyzed different features of the posters, but the overall summary is still lacking. Despite the variation, I argue that the posters do have three main features. The first important common feature is the use of the positive role models as central figures, which, furthermore, was used to promote understanding of the central message. Emphasizing the heroic model was a commonly used method and is based on Jiang Qing’s idea of “three prominences” (san tuchu) (Evans and Donald 1999, 4; Landsberger 1995, 27–28, 40). The second main feature is the overall clarity of expression, which also emphasized the main message. Posters had to be immediately understandable by a large group of different types of people, so the main message of the poster was simplified. Especially the relationship between what was acceptable and what was not was boldly depicted, sometimes even creating rather naïve representations. Key figures and terms were continuously repeated. Besides these compositional means, posters included headlines or phrases, which strictly guided the correct understanding of the message. As a result, although the posters represented a multilevel symbolism, the main meaning was instantly readable (see, e.g., Evans and Donald 1999, 4, 18; Clunas 1999, 48, 55–57). The third typical feature is the realistic expression combined with idealism. Realism was emphasized and artists were sent to farms and to workplaces in order to observe how the work was actually done. Learning from the masses was a prerequisite for appropriate art. For example, the correctness in depicting work was so important that artists might even consult with workers before finishing sketches as paintings (Gittings 1999, 38–39; Galikowski 1998, 64–65). In spite of this, for example, Evans and Donald suggest, and I agree, that the posters did not reflect social reality (Evans and Donald 1999, 1). Instead, the posters created a socialist utopia, which people would and should strive for. In them, people are determined and gazing trustfully into the future. Faces are glowing with enthusiasm, eyes are shining, and the widely smiling mouths reveal bright white teeth. But, how real was this in actuality? Nobody looks tired or exhausted; nothing is broken, old, or even dirty. The pictures create a belief in a common, happy future, where nothing is worth complaining about.

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Many posters simultaneously represented various themes, so classifying them in accordance with a subject matter is not easy. The most common subjects are Mao Zedong, women, children, campaigns regarding social values, and promoting development (see, e.g., posters in Xiao 2002, or in Min et al. 2003). Themes often reflected current social issues. For example, posters at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution heavily promoted the social struggle. The style used in these posters was often exaggerated and provocative. In the beginning of the 1970s, depicting such struggle decreased and, instead, posters portrayed social themes like the equality of women, solidarism, and so on. Posters also tried to become more appealing by making reference to folk art (Evans and Donald 1999, 9; Gittings 1999, 27–34). Posters do not, however, reflect the real roles of gender or age in society. Women, for example, were often depicted in posters, but actually in the roles of men. Furthermore, most often, the socialist hero is a man. Besides this, people in the posters are mainly young and healthy. Old or sick people were depicted very rarely, if at all (Evans 1999, 65–75; Donald 1999, 79–80; Clunas 1999, 57–58). Overall, the posters give a modified perspective regarding the social structure. This is also an example of the way in which reality and utopia are depicted simultaneously in the posters. The depicting of work itself is realism, but who actually does it and how is partly unrealistic. The number of posters depicting children grew in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, they were made both for and about children. The meaning of these posters was to present acceptable role models for education. Children are thus depicted as red-cheeked, political actors and they were supposed to behave accordingly. In many posters, parents are replaced by the symbols of the state. This emphasizes the direct relationship between the state and children. As a result, children were educated to be loyal, above all, to the nation and to its leader, Chairman Mao, instead of to their own family members. The innocence of plump, happy children appeals simultaneously to the nostalgic feelings of adults and reflects the common welfare. Therefore, these pictures reflect both the happy past and a hopeful future. And because children were often portrayed with politically related symbols, posters of children became manifestations of political optimism and continuity of the revolutionary spirit (Donald 1999, 79–96). Political posters were an integral part of everyday life during the Cultural Revolution. The Party controlled the political discussion with messages communicated through posters and, as a result, posters stated demands for the masses. They emphasized diligence, unity, and sacrifice. Posters did not provide an escape from reality, but rather they embodied political meaning, restrictions, and even terror into everyday routines. The expressional means had many, often overlapping functions; posters were meant to educate,

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inspire, persuade, convince, decorate, promote ideologies—revolution or a personal cult—and act as artwork, and so on. Most importantly, posters were used as expressions of power, especially when depicting Mao Zedong or the Party. Naturally posters could not completely control the reactions of an individual and different emotions, from devotion to disgust, are possible. Despite this variation in reactions, posters did create a very political public consensus overall (Gittings 1999, 29–37; Evans and Donald 1999, 4–5, 10–18; Evans 1999, 64–65; Benewick 1999, 124). Furthermore, according to Duo Duo, who grew up surrounded by posters, “They made sure we did not make mistakes” (Duo 2003, 10). This statement summarizes the power of the posters as a means of governmental control. Chairman Mao It has been estimated that about 2.2 billion portraits of Mao Zedong were produced during the Cultural Revolution. Especially at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, most of the posters depicted Chairman Mao. The personality cult of Mao was very strongly promoted and left no one uninformed about Mao’s ideology. The cult was highly politicized and its main characteristics were the mobilization of masses, violence, and the teaching of ideology. The amount, variety, and omnipresence of the visual material were so overwhelming that it did not leave the possibility to question Mao’s status (Benewick 1999, 123–27; Gittings 1999, 28–35). At least one official portrait of Chairman Mao had to be in every home, office, and workplace (Gittings 1999, 28). Officially, Mao was described as the Great Leader, Great Teacher, Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman. As Chairman Mao, he represented all these roles simultaneously. In addition to these characters, artists had to portray Mao also as a young scholar or the inspirer of the revolution, for instance. In many posters, Mao is depicted above the masses as the Great Leader of the whole nation, or as the red sun whose glory will lead the people into a bright future (see, e.g., Benewick 1999, 123–30). In these posters, I maintain that he is often portrayed like a god guiding the people (see, e.g., “Chairman Mao is the red sun in the hearts of the people of every land” in Min et al. 2003, 110). Many times, Mao is also portrayed as a father figure, a great teacher, or as a revolutionary hero. In these posters, he is more humanlike, although not a commoner. One of the most famous posters, “Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan,” belongs in this category. The poster was extremely popular and it became the symbol of the Cultural Revolution (see, e.g., Gittings 1999, 35; Evans and Donald 1999, 9; Benewick 1999, 124–25). In this poster, Mao’s

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determined and sophisticated appearance even roused the desire to worship and follow him without hesitation (Jiang 1998, 111). Moreover, when Mao is surrounded by people, he is always the main figure in the composition. Interestingly, he is almost always bigger than others. This illusion is usually created with unnaturally long legs and big hands. Often all the people around Mao are gazing at him with overwhelming admiration. In this context, the lack of physical contact to people is also used to emphasize the mental distance (Benewick 1999, 126–29). Furthermore, Mao is picked out by the use of light and shadow. In some posters, it seems that the light glows from the interior of Mao himself. Although Mao is depicted as a human among people, he is not actually one of them; distance between him and people still exists. In many posters, Mao is also depicted indirectly. His presence and his ideology are depicted through symbols of political activism: a Mao badge, the Little Red Book, or a slogan of Mao. These symbols were also used in the posters depicting Mao directly in order to emphasize the effectiveness of the poster. Obviously these symbols were expressions of power, likewise the posters depicting Mao directly. They emphasized Mao’s omnipresence even when he himself was not portrayed (Benewick 1999, 124–29). Moreover, just as Mao’s portraits could radiate light, so too could Mao’s Little Red Book be depicted as emitting red sunrays, thus becoming a nearly sacred doctrine leading the nation. The posters of Mao were used, in this way, as a governing tool. People categorized into five black categories (counterrevolutionaries, rightists, and former landowners, for example) sometimes had to show repentance and respect by kneeling and bowing to Mao’s portrait (Jiang 1998, 111–20). Furthermore, portraits were used for educational purposes, for example, in mental hospitals: a photograph by Li Zhensheng shows patients making their morning pledge of allegiance to a portrait of Mao with Little Red Books in their hands (see Li 2003, 223). How often Mao’s official portraits were used like this is unknown. Furthermore, a historical novel might not always be completely tenable, but I claim that even these examples are enough to suggest that this type of function did exist. In this way, portraits of Mao became tools of humiliation and punishment as well. More often documented are examples in which portraits were carried in group meetings and demonstrations (see, e.g., Li 2003, 219). Many photographs in magazines and newspapers reveal the way in which portraits were part of an almost religious behavior and gained iconographical status among the masses. The same phenomenon is also illustrated in some posters (see, e.g., “We cheer the successful opening of the 4th National People’s Congress,” in Min et al. 2003, 26–27).

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Posters depicting Mao, or symbols related to him, definitely educated the masses: they socialized people to follow Mao and his ideology unquestionably. As a consequence, they can thus be seen as an effective means of governmental control. Besides devotion, the overwhelming omnipresence and the multilevel roles of Mao may have caused different reactions from anxiety to fear. Furthermore, Chen clarifies with examples that sometimes posters could be interpreted contrary to their original meaning by evoking rebellion against Mao (Chen 1999, 115–16). Presence through an official picture or statue always represents power, so in practice, everyone was continuously supervised by Mao through portraits—even though people were not necessarily always conscious of this position. Therefore, I suggest that in representing the omnipotence of Chairman Mao, these posters and portraits also provoked and induced psychological chaos, insecurity, and terror among people, especially among those who were objects of the use of Mao’s portrait as tools of control, punishment, or humiliation. Agitation A small number of the posters reveal any signs at all directly related to terror or violence. Most of the posters depict production, agriculture, and other nonviolent themes. In fact, this lack of violence in posters can also be regarded as one reason for creating confusion and fear; indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, different kinds of violent acts and terror, such as riots, fights, and the destruction of buildings, did occur. Even beatings, humiliations, and executions occurred in public places as depicted in photographs and memoirs (see, e.g., Li 2003, 95, 101, 106, 111). This obvious conflict between posters and reality may have induced disorientation among people because the messages of the desired behavior were contradictory. The world of posters mainly showed harmonious living and working together, but in practice, this was impossible while Red Guards were on the rampage, especially in urban areas. Posters depicting actual physical attacks scarcely exist, but different levels of violence are present in some posters. Mental violence is depicted, for example, in a poster where a group of people is verbally criticizing a person in the middle (see “A bad element is publicly criticized,” in Min et al. 2003, 110). In some posters, violence is depicted in a very vague form, as in the presence of a gun when a member of the people’s militia is standing guard. Guns are depicted also in posters about meetings, demonstrations, and militia training of soldiers, women, or even children. In some posters, a brush or tools can be depicted in threatening positions combined with angered expressions. As

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such, they literally become the weapons of revolution as Mao defined them to be. However, violence is most clearly present in agitation posters. In some, there is quite a distressing level of violence present: fierce expressions of hatred portraying desired attitudes against both foreign and internal enemies. Sometimes fists in the air are depicted as being even bigger than the face in order to emphasize power (see also Gittings 1999, 32). Correct attitudes were taught also to children with violence, as in the poster where children were depicted mocking a snowman dressed as a class enemy (see “Punish the rascal!” in Min et al. 2003, 63). This kind of agitation, embedded with either hidden or obvious violence, was easily readable at any level of expression and was distressing to the people living in such a chaotic environment. Although most of the posters do not show real acts of violence, the agitation can be seen to promote the violence and even be seen as a precondition for it. Besides, for those victims who had already been terrorized by the Red Guards, these posters could evoke similar feelings to those they experienced during the acts of violence: humiliation and even terror. Also for those who were supposed to act accordingly and attack their relatives against their own will, these agitation posters may have given rise to mental contradiction and fear. As a consequence, I suggest that, overall, the agitation posters can be seen as causing mental violence and terror among people. Socialist Utopia versus Reality Another form of contradiction between pictures and reality is revealed when one examines the posters representing a socialist utopia. These posters created the future’s idealistic world by using unreal sceneries filled with joyful, hardworking peasants, and divinely beautiful youth filled with revolutionary spirit. The difference between reality and the ideal world depicted in posters is evident if one compares the authentic photographs of the period to the posters (see, e.g., Li 2003). In keeping with my general observation of mental terror, I suggest that this obvious contradiction specifically caused distress and confusion concerning truth among people. In the case of students, posters created a beautiful image of the countryside showing fellow students smilingly working in the fields or in immaculate factories (see, e.g., “Young Red Guards learn from the workers,” “Joyfully gazing upon the fields of wheat” or “A new sight in the frontier zone,” in Min et al. 2003, 116–17, 194, 226). In reality, many of them might have been badly disappointed when they noticed that working was not that joyful, but

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actually very hard work in poor conditions. Everyday life was tough, resources often insufficient, and usually even meals were meager. Anchee Min also writes about how life was so unbearable in the collective labor farm that many youths even injured themselves purposely so that they could claim disability and return home again (Min 2003, 5; also Duo 2003, 10–11). Nothing like this is depicted in the posters, in which there are no maladies or shortage of anything. Quite the contrary, everything is new, harvests are plentiful and everyone works happily (see, e.g., the posters “Spring rain,” “Planting rice by machine is wonderful,” or “What a pleasure it is not to bend our backs while planting rice!” in Min et al. 2003, 172–73). Facing a completely unexpected reality can be quite a traumatic experience. How does one handle the situation in which everything one is told seems to be untrue? In such circumstances, one is easily caught up in a mental conflict: whether to question “the truth” that is told, the reality in which you live, or your own understanding of that reality. Heroic Models A similar contradiction could have been elicited by the posters of heroic models that were created for women, children, and men. Landsberger states that a model should be recognizable and common enough so the viewer could see similar elements of one’s own life in the model (Landsberger 1995, 27). I also think that the presumed effectiveness of these role models was based on two features that the models could be recognized and/or identified with, but these methods are employed differently with two categories of models. Several posters portraying well-known heroes, like Lei Feng, Liu Hulan, and Pan Dongzi were made and distributed. In these, the recognition factor of a wellknown person made sure that the viewer would, first of all, identify the role model correctly. Secondly, a viewer could also identify with the famous person, imagine becoming like the model. On the other hand, anonymous positive role models were depicted in numerous posters. Posters showed common people, men, women, and children, acting bravely. The commonness of the figure made these posters effective: anyone could and would identify themselves with these models; “anyone” could be the main character. In one interesting poster, called “Shell horn called,” in the background, people with guns are riding bicycles into a fight. At the front, as a central figure in the poster, is a young determined mother on her way out the door of her home: she is going into this fight armed with a pitchfork and a sleeping baby tied onto her back (Xiao 2002, 85). This poster rouses questions about

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realistic behavior: would a mother really act like that? Were Chinese women supposed to put the revolution first, despite the risk it posed to their children? It seems that this was indeed the case. The posters’ main idea was to show the model, the ideal person, devoted to the revolution regardless of any other consideration. In other words, posters determined what one should be. By emphasizing an identification with the main characters of such posters, they also gave the viewer strength to believe that one day, after some diligence and hard work, one would become “one of them,” a model for others. But if one did not fulfill the expectations, one was to be considered at least a failure, if not a counterrevolutionary. If one lived under this kind of governmental control for years as a teenager, how was one expected to escape being affected? How is one’s personality shaped in such a conflict? I argue that these propaganda posters, by subjugating recipients to imaginary heroic models, caused insecurity, confusion, and even fear. Especially the main target group, the youth, was fascinated by the heroic models and was seized with enthusiasm to follow their example, but in the end felt distressed if they fell short of their own expectations. Moreover, questioning the models was not actually possible. If one criticized them, one might be reported by friends or relatives as a counterrevolutionary. So, in order to maintain physical and mental health, it was better to follow the masses and the heroic models. Chinese youth responded to the posters in many ways. Posters aroused admiration, but also mental chaos, frustration, and uncertainty of the truth. According to Chen’s memoirs, she grew up in a culture where posters reminded, replayed, educated, and reeducated what she was and what society expected of her. Chen wished to become like the role models and she tirelessly competed with her classmates who exercised the best in revolutionary standards: diligence, obedience, and humbleness (Chen 1999, 101–19). A similar experience is recorded by Anchee Min, who writes, “I wanted to be the girl in the poster when I was growing up. Every day I dressed up like that girl in a white cotton shirt with a red scarf around my neck, and I braided my hair the same way. I liked the fact that I was surrounded by the revolutionary martyrs, whom I was taught to worship since kindergarten. . . . I continued to dream that one day I would be honored to have an opportunity to sacrifice myself for Mao, and become the girl in the poster” (Min 2003, 5). Such posters can be compared to today’s advertisements and the illusionist world they create. How many of us have, at least sometimes, felt, consciously or unconsciously, distressed by the role models provided by commercials? How often have we chosen our clothing and appearance, at least partly, based on the things we have seen in advertisements and on fashion models? How many of us can really claim never to have been affected by

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them? Even more important is the question regarding how we react when we notice that we are not as beautiful, successful, rich, or capable as the role models provided for us; are we disappointed, depressed, or even afraid of becoming failed persons according to such social standards? Nevertheless, there are some differences between propaganda posters and today’s advertisements. The posters offered the only role model of that time and everyone was required to adapt oneself to these models, going even as far as imitating the dressing and hairstyle. Models and the socialist utopia were meant to be real and realized by everyone; people really tried their best to imitate what they saw in the posters. Nowadays at least, we know that the models and the illusionist world provided by advertisements are not real. Only a few of us can imitate such models and, actually, we do not even have to. Furthermore, today we also have more role models and lifestyles to choose from provided by different media and ideologies. From these arguments, I believe that the posters had a much stronger effect on their audience than advertisements have today. As a side effect, they also incited competition and frustration when people failed to meet the set expectations. Therefore, I suggest that these posters depicting models that can be seen as a government’s mental terror against its own people. Artists I suggest that the most influential way of using artwork to provoke terror emerged when art was turned against artists by Party officials. Both art and artists were strictly under the control of the CCP and, therefore, art that deviated from the Party’s ideology was not possible to publish. After the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, all public artistic creation was devoted to propaganda work. Often professional artists had to work collectively in groups in order to submerge their individuality. Professional artists were seen as a part of the elite and, for this reason, they could not be completely trusted. Instead the paintings made by peasants, who were often taught by professionals, were highly appreciated. These “amateur painters” were seen as a part of the masses and therefore depicting the true spirit of the revolution (Cohen 1987, 21–22; Galikowski 1998, 78–114, 152–54). Artworks were used, in turn, to control the artists who had created them. They were studied carefully by officials, and were sometimes severely criticized on seemingly unreasonable grounds. The artist could never be sure what would be deemed rightist and why; no one knew where the limits were. A work of art prized earlier could, after a few years, be interpreted as a “black painting.” For example, in 1974, special exhibitions held in major cities put

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“black paintings” on display as negative examples. Paintings were labeled as “counterrevolutionary elements” on different grounds, for example, if the painter had used too much black ink in it. Artists classified as rightist or bourgeoisie were sent for reeducation to the labor camps or even to prison (Cohen 1987, 21–22; Galikowski 1998, 158–63). This uncertainty and the possibility of consequences definitely incited terror among artists. Painting a portrait of Mao is a clear example of this control of art. The propaganda department defined exact rules for depicting Mao. If artists deviated from such rules, both the artwork and the artist could be labeled as counterrevolutionary (Benewick 1999, 125; Evans and Donald 1999, 4). As a result, painting a portrait of Mao became rather risky: if the painting was evaluated as “correct,” nothing happened and the painter often stayed anonymous, but if the painting was “not correct,” the painter would become known and even threatened publicly. Therefore, despite the honor of being chosen to paint Mao’s portrait, the task undoubtedly also raised fears among artists, especially among those whose paintings had been previously criticized. To avoid criticism, some even attached official photographs of Mao to the painting rather than painting his portrait by themselves. Indeed, basically all artists were affected by the Cultural Revolution, insofar as they were criticized and humiliated both privately and publicly. Some artists even committed suicide in these inhuman circumstances (Cohen 1987, 21–22). Especially for older artists, pictures from the Cultural Revolution period strongly reflected the experiences of physical and mental violence (Andrews 1994, 314-315). Without a doubt, therefore, professional artists as a group suffered most from governmental terror during the Cultural Revolution, since a majority of them, if not all, experienced some level of violence of a mental or physical nature, if not both. Scar Art After Mao’s death in 1976, the situation of art and artists slowly changed. Post-1976 art began gradually to portray the reality of the Cultural Revolution. Reflections of traumatic experiences can be found especially in literature but also in the visual arts, called scar art. This art was used to rewrite the silent history and bring out the tragedies of individuals. As such, it can be said to function as a healing method within the society. Scar art worked as a means of self-reflection and aimed for collective purification (Köppel-Yang 2003, 84; Galikowski 1998, 193–99). The real scenes of violent occurrences that scar art depicts emphasize the unreality shown in posters. Simultaneously, they provide proof of the enormous contradiction between art and reality during the previous decades.

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Finally, artworks since the end of the 1970s portray the images that art from the Cultural Revolution would have depicted if it had been allowed to reflect society as it really was. Life was not that happy at all, but rather full of contradictions, fear, and terror for many. Even the smallest suspicion of misbehavior could precipitate serious consequences. Furthermore, the propaganda posters strengthened and multiplied these emotions by their omnipresence, expression, and function. A statement from Zhang Hongtu, a contemporary Chinese artist living nowadays in New York, emphasizes the healing function of the post-1976 art. He writes, “I found that all the young people, including myself, were all fooled and used by Mao. . . . For me, Mao’s image was god-like in China. What I have done is pull down this image from the pantheon to reality. Working on Mao is one way to extricate myself from the nightmare; first I felt sinful and fearful, now I feel nothing” (Zhang in Wu 2005, 46). Conclusion Obviously the main intention of art, and especially propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution, was to change the society, not to reflect it. Art in different forms was the main medium for propagating the Party’s ideology. In order to compel people to strive for a socialist utopia as a united front, posters clearly stated acceptable behavior and political thinking through provision of positive role models. In other words, posters created a strict form of social behavior in presenting values and norms. Because the ideals were set by the Chinese Communist Party, propaganda posters served, without question, as tools of effective governmental control. As discussed in this chapter, posters were used in different ways to create confusion, anxiety, fear, frustration, distress, and even terror among people. In their memoirs, people state that they were powerfully influenced and manipulated by this propaganda (see, e.g., Jiang 1998, 265–67; Min 2003, 5). The creating, producing, and distribution of posters was strictly controlled by the government, in order to systematically change the political behavior and thinking of the masses. As such, propaganda posters fulfill the following part of the definition of terrorism, stated earlier, “Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought” (Schmid 1988, 28). In such a light, propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution can clearly be seen to have functioned as part of a systematic program of governmental terror against its own people.

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References Andrews, Julia F. 1994. Painters and politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Benewick, Robert. 1999. Icons of power: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 123–37. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Chang, Arnold. 1980. Painting in the People’s Republic of China: The politics of style. Boulder, CO: Westview. Chen, Xiaomei. 1999. Growing up with posters in the Maoist era. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 101–22. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Clunas, Craig. 1999. Souvenirs of Beijing: Authority and subjectivity in art historical memory. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 47–61. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cohen, Joan Lebold. 1987. The new Chinese painting 1949–1986. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Crenshaw Hutchinson, Martha. The concept of revolutionary terrorism. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 16 (3): 383–96, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022 –0027%28197209%2916%3A3%3C383%3ATCORT%3E2.0.CO%3B2–I (Gateway link to JSTOR article, accessed February 12, 2007). Donald, Stephanie. 1999. Children as political messengers: Art, childhood and continuity. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 79–100. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Duo, Duo. 2003. Looking at the propaganda posters. In Chinese propaganda posters, ed. Anchee Min, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger, 10–11. Köln: Taschen. Evans, Harriet. 1999. Comrade sisters: Gendered bodies and spaces. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 63–78. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Evans, Harriet, and Stephanie Donald. 1999. Introducing posters of China’s Cultural Revolution. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 1–26. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Galikowski, Maria. 1998. Art and politics in China 1949–1984. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Gittings, John. 1999. Excess and enthusiasm. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 27–46. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jiang, Ji-Li. 1998. Red scarf girl: A memoir of the Cultural Revolution. New York: Collins.

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Köppel-Yang, Martina. 2003. Semiotic warfare: The Chinese avant-garde, 1979–1989; A semiotic analysis. Hong Kong: Timezone 8. Laing, Ellen J. 1988. The winking owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Landsberger, Stefan R. 2003. The rise and fall of the Chinese propaganda poster. In Chinese propaganda posters, ed. Anchee Min, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger, 16–17. Köln: Taschen. ———. 1995. Chinese propaganda posters: From revolution to modernization. Amsterdam: Pepin. Li, Zhensheng. 2003. Red-color news soldier. London: Phaidon. Mao, Tse-tung. 1967. On literature and art. Peking: Foreign Languages. Min, Anchee. 2003. The girl in the poster. In Chinese propaganda posters, ed. Anchee Min, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger, 5. Köln: Taschen. Min, Anchee, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger. 2003. Chinese propaganda posters. Köln: Taschen. Schmid, Alex P. 1988. Terrorism and related concepts: Definition. In Political terrorism: A new guide to actors, authors, concepts, data bases, theories and literature, Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman, 1–38. Amsterdam: North-Holland. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 2007. Definitions of terrorism. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. http://www.unodc.org/unodc/ terrorism_definitions.html (accessed March 6, 2007). Wu, Hung. 2005. Transience: Chinese experimental art at the end of the twentieth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Xiao, Wuliao. 2002. Jiqing shishang: 70 niandai Zhongguoren de yishu yu shenghuo. Shandong: Shandong Huabao Chubanshe.

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CHAPTER 10

The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria1 Javier Franzé

Introduction

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his chapter aims to analyze the problem of the relation between ethics and politics as posed in the film The Sweet Hereafter, by Atom Egoyan,2 rooted in the theories of Machiavelli and Weber on good and evil in politics. It also looks to test these theories with the challenges exposed in the film, and to see if the film can help expose the limits of this reflection and suggest possible solutions. The Sweet Hereafter allows for reflection on the relation between ethics and politics because it raises the question of how to understand the sense of community by questioning its future, as seen generally through its children—the next generation of a town’s citizens. The weave of this work is shaped by two sets of questions, which are threaded throughout. On the one hand, where lies the good within the quandary proposed by The Sweet Hereafter? Which is the good and ethically desirable political solution? On the other hand, does tension really exist between the good of the victims and the good of the community, as the character of Nicole proposes, or can both be brought into harmony with one another, as the lawyer, Stephens, suggests? What are the consequences of not investigating the truth? What does “saving the community” mean? Is it enough to consider the consequences of the action itself in order to do good in politics?

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Henceforth, the central theme of The Sweet Hereafter will be presented, as well as the two proposed possibilities that appear as solutions to the ethicalpolitical quandary posed by the film. Then the reflections of Machiavelli and Weber on the relation between ethics and politics will be exposed so as to evaluate these two proposals. This will allow for reflection on the achievements and limits of this speculation in order to analyze the question of good and evil in politics. Lastly, there will be some commentary and conclusion. Horrific, monstrous situations are laced throughout the story. They are fearsome and repellent, but not because they are entirely exceptional, as they would be in monster stories or stories about extraordinary beings. These situations deal with events lodged in the ambiguity/impurity that lies in the interstices; not between that which is human and nonhuman, but rather on the edge between what is habitual-exceptional, normal-abnormal, and suffered by the common person. A car accident, AIDS, drug addiction, incest, the children’s deaths, and the rupture of community life are all events close to daily life; they sprout from it, yet at the same time entail crossing a delicate and sensitive line, which eternally and hopelessly shake up and disturb the existence of those involved. Extreme situations of horror are a constant, dislocated from normality. Perhaps what lies in this threatening vicinity is the most terrifying of all.3 The Story On the morning of December 6, 1995, the school bus that picks up the children of Sam Dent, a small town in British Columbia, Canada, runs off the road and slides over a frozen lake. The weight of the bus is too much for the ice and ends up sinking into the freezing water. Fourteen of the twenty-one children die, threatening to rob the town of its future. The driver, Dolores Driscoll, who has been driving this route for the past fifteen years and who has an especially close and loving relationship with the parents and children—perhaps because she does not have her own children—survives the accident. Nicole Burnell, one teenage survivor, ends up paralyzed. Her parents, Sam and Mary, later play an integral part in the fight for justice and psychological closure sought out by some of the victims’ parents. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, goes to the town to convince the grieving parents to file a lawsuit. At first, he is not overly welcomed, in the midst of this stressful and painful situation, but little by little, many families buy into his proposal, like the Ottos and the Walkers, who both lost their only children, and the aforementioned Burnells. Stephens promises to take a third of the

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money awarded from the lawsuit only if they win. So either way, his services will not cost the families anything. However, Stephens does not convince everyone. Nicole, who ends up paralyzed from the waist down—and whose parents are the lawyer’s main allies—and Billy Ansel, the town mechanic (widowed due to his wife’s fatal cancer), who now loses both of his twins in the accident, head the group opposed to the idea of the lawsuit. Ansel is sure that it was an accident. He says that he himself had serviced the bus in his shop. Furthermore, he is the only one who witnesses the accident. He was on his way to work that morning, as usual, driving his truck behind the school bus and waving to his children who were sitting at the back of the bus. The night before the accident, Nicole is babysitting Ansel’s children while Ansel is with his lover, Risa Walker, in the motel she runs with her husband, Wendell Walker, who has gone to see a hockey game. Nicole is reading The Pied Piper of Hamelin to the children as a bedtime story. Ansel also gives Nicole some of his deceased wife Lydia’s clothes. Nicole is wearing one of these sweaters the next day, when the accident happens. That night, Nicole’s father, Sam, picks her up from Billy’s house. As they arrive home, he leads her, without a word, to the barn, which is lit with small candles. They have an erotic encounter in this oneiric atmosphere. The lawyer goes full force with the lawsuit: he convinces Nicole—with the help of her parents—to testify last, and subpoenas Ansel to make a declaration. Stephens’s lawsuit is not the only one, since the town is teeming with lawyers and some families hire more than one. The legal processes multiply and with these, so do the agreements and negotiations between the parties. There are many scenes that exemplify the conflict between those for and those against Stephens’s lawsuit: Nicole and her parents on the day she returns from the hospital; Ansel and Nicole’s parents the day before she testifies; Ansel and his lover, Risa Walker, who has also lost a son in the accident; and finally, Ansel and the lawyer, Stephens, when he tries to convince Ansel to join the lawsuit, after taking footage of the totaled bus. The day of Nicole’s testimony finally arrives. Stephens has arranged for Nicole to testify last, in order to favor his argument. Nicole had already warned Stephens that she would not lie, that she would only tell the truth. Stephens agrees with this. He expects her testimony to be brief and vague since all throughout her recovery and up to that point she has claimed not to remember much about the accident, and her doctors corroborate this. However, to her father Sam and the lawyer’s surprise, Nicole claims on the stand that she starts to remember things, and testifies that Dolores was driving very fast that day. She claims to be sure of this because she could see the

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speedometer from the first seat on the bus, where she always sat. She says that it was up to seventy-two miles per hour, but that there was no time for warning since the accident happened so fast. Her declaration ruins Stephens’s strategy and it destroys his lawsuit, which is based on the idea that everything was due to negligence on behalf of the bus manufacturer, the local or state government, as well as all of the other existing lawsuits in town. With her testimony almost over, and in the midst of Stephens and Sam’s stupor, Nicole’s voice can be heard in a voice-over—paraphrasing The Pied Piper of Hamelin—admitting that she has lied, but from this lie has come a (new) truth. The scene changes to November 22, 1997, two years after the event. Stephens sees Dolores in an airport, supposedly not far from Sam Dent. Dolores now drives a hotel bus. She seems to have recovered the happiness that characterized her before the accident. Nicole’s voice narrating, continuing the story from before, asks if Stephens understands that now, everyone in the town, including Dolores and the children who died, have become citizens of a new town, with its own rules, and it lives in the sweet hereafter, a strange and new place. The Two Points of View: Stephens and Nicole There are two positions on the ethical-political problem that the film poses: that of Stephens, the lawyer, and the families in town who hire him (the Ottos, the Walkers, and the Burnells), and that of Nicole and Ansel. Stephens’s position can be characterized by: (a) the idea that accidents do not happen (“The word doesn’t mean anything to me.”), but rather there is always some negligence, someone who does not do their job, or, even worse, someone who makes a “cynical and dark” calculation between the cost of a bolt and that of people’s lives; (b) giving priority to the search for moral responsibility, for the truth, in order to avoid another tragedy of the sort; (c) the idea that the existing laws and justice system are useful instruments for this end; and (d) the idea that the mobilization of those affected can be efficient, insofar as the law channels their rage. In short, this position trusts in securing the future of the community by means of bringing the truth about those responsible for the accident to the surface, which, in turn, returns honor to the community; it aspires to continuity between the past, the present, and the future: one can only move forward by remembering. In considering Nicole and Ansel’s position, it is characterized by (a) the idea that accidents do happen; (b) the notion that the main issue concerns the consequences that the investigation has on coexistence in the community; and (c) the deduction from the latter, the idea that the existing laws and

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justice system are not always useful means for attaining the end of saving the community, since they can also destroy it: the mobilization of those affected can be good for finding the truth, but it is precisely because of this that it can be harmful to coexistence. The process of searching for the truth—the investigation prior to clarification—with the multiplying lawsuits and the crossing accusations that come with them may destroy coexistence by undermining the mutual trust and appreciation between the members of the community. For Nicole and Ansel, coexistence is above the truth or above the pernicious effects of the search for it. This is why they trust in the conscience of the individual or of the community to avoid the repetition of such a tragedy. In short, this side believes that the truth about the accident is most probably harmful for the future of the community; it subordinates the past and even the present, to the future: in order to move forward, one must forget some things. The Relation between Ethics and Politics in Machiavelli and Weber Machiavelli and Weber’s theory on ethics and politics could be useful for evaluating the two opposing positions on this problem in ethical-political terms. These authors reflect on the relation between ethics and politics in the following premises. First, both stem from one fundamental distinction: not between ethics and politics, but rather between classical ethics (GrecoRoman and Judeo-Christian)4 and political ethics. There is no such thing as universal ethics, valid for all situations in life in general. There are certain areas of activity that put the achievement of the good at stake. One of those areas is politics. Second, classical ethics is characterized by a number of factors. First is the search for good individual conduct. Therefore, being a good individual and a good citizen is one and the same; it conceives political ethics as an extension of individual ethics to the field of politics, and thus, politics as a branch of ethics. The second factor is the understanding of good individual conduct as a pure and integral fulfillment of a set of determined virtues, those which it considers objective truths of mankind that allow a person to attain humanity. The final factor is the vision of the world as having an inherent sense that is ethically rational (good begets good and evil begets evil; there is no possible contradiction between good and good, only between good and evil). Third, political ethics is characterized by the four concepts developed below: (a) The affirmation that good and good individual conduct are both present in politics, yet specific to it and dependent on political logic. Politics is not a branch of ethics, but rather, political ethics exists on its own.

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(b) The specific nature of politics, due to the ends it strives for, the place where it searches to attain them (the world in which it works) and the specific instrument with which it searches. Indeed, politics is an earthly activity, which searches for ends in this world. The world does not have an inherent sense, nor is this sense moral. Therefore, the results of an action are not determined by its moral content, rather, for purely factual reasons, among which strength is often paramount, but also includes prestige, legitimacy, perception of those involved, etc. The relation between good and evil is paradoxical. Machiavelli calls this fortuna5; Weber calls it the Ethical Irrationality of the World (Weber 1997a, 122–23). Weber delves deeper into this point than Machiavelli, as he declares that values cannot be understood scientifically, but rather that they are an act of faith. Science can only aid in the decision making by clarifying thought: it helps to analyze the consistency, coherency, and efficiency of the decision in terms of the values that it claims to be aiming to defend. Therefore, there is no moral objective truth, but rather, the world is inevitably open to the fight for values (Weber 1997b, 147–48). Moreover, the good that politics pursues is a common earthly good, not an individual one. These two goods can be contradictory, precisely because the world is a factual reality and not a moral one: in this case, in politics, common good must be chosen over individual good. Furthermore, this is what makes someone into an upstanding politician/citizen. Being a good individual is not the same as being a good citizen/politician. Saving one’s soul is not the same as saving the city. Governing a community is not the same as governing oneself (Berlin 1981, 64). Weber adds one more detail: the way in which politics ensures the fulfillment of common ends is through violence. In other words, what characterizes the modern state is the monopoly of legitimate violence. This, along with the ethical irrationality of the world, makes the ethics of politics one of responsibility, based on the consideration of the consequences of the actions taken to achieve the ends themselves, and not one of conviction, based on the unconditional defense of one’s own values, which are seen as absolute truths. The ethics of conviction is unpolitical because it is not able to see the paradoxical relation between good and evil. It does not perceive the world as a factual reality, not moral; therefore, within it, there lies the possibility that an action inspired by a value that is considered good by its bearer brings about bad consequences for this value and for its bearer. Good can beget evil. (c) Given these characteristics of politics (ethical irrationality of the world or fortuna, preeminence of the common good, politics as an earthly activity, political power based on violence), acting ethically consists in calculating the probability of the consequences of one’s actions, not the good or bad character of the values that guide the action, as well as in being willing to do evil in order to achieve good, if it is necessary. Given the hegemony of classical

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ethics, the latter usually manifests in two forms: as an acceptance of the fact that even the values considered good must be mixed with violence—viewed as an evil by classical ethics—in which politics is based, in order to be fulfilled; and as a necessity for making a choice between the common good and the individual good. In politics, the common good is considered over the individual good because its logic is the defense of the community’s interests; he or she who practices politics makes decisions that effect third parties, thus, is obligated to consider these third parties over himself; and, finally, there is no individual good outside of the common good: it is a requisite of this. Because of this, when given the choice between saving one’s own soul and saving the city, the politician must choose the second at the cost of the first. Lastly, acting ethically consists in doing evil well: doing the least possible evil in order to be effective. This is only done out of necessity (indicated by the calculation of probabilities), not out of conviction. Doing evil well implies a certain amount of lesser evil, which is derived from doing evil poorly. (d) The criteria of ethical action in politics being that lesser evils avoid greater evils, and not, as usually said in reference to Machiavelli, that the end justifies the means.6 The difference between both criteria lies in the fact that the latter does not condemn evil means, but rather it legitimates these means in virtue of the value of the end. On the contrary, he who is guided by the criteria that avoids greater evils by choosing lesser evils ethically condemns evil means and only legitimates it in accordance with political logic as such. The Two Ethics and the Problem of the Sweet Hereafter These two ethics, classical and political, are not represented purely in the film, but rather, being ideal types, are presented in an impure and combined way. Nevertheless, according to this perspective, the two opposing positions in the film could be understood in the following way: Nicole and Ansel’s position would represent political ethics—as Machiavelli and Weber understood it—while Stephens’s would better represent private individual ethics, more classical and Judeo-Christian. One’s objective is to be a good citizen, while the other’s is to be a good individual. The main difference between the two is the place of evil in politics, which is related to the characterization of the sense given to the world and to politics as a specific activity. The Position of Mitchell Stephens and the Families that Follow Him This position is closer to classical ethics because within it, the world appears as a rationalized place, which determines the trust in the success of what is considered moral (in this case, the truth of the matter) and certainty that the

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gratuitous and meaningless cannot happen. The latter can be seen in how Stephens, before knowing anything about the situation, starts with the idea that accidents never happen and he has no doubt that the truth will keep the tragedy from being repeated. Not accepting the possibility of an irrational world in ethical terms is also seen in Risa Walker, one of Stephens’s supporters. She tells Billy Ansel in the motel that “she needs to believe” that something caused the accident, be it the guardrail, or Lydia’s sweater—Ansel’s dead wife’s—that Nicole wore on the day of the accident. Ansel responded to her by saying that he did not need to believe in anything, “It sounds like you’re looking for a witch doctor, not a lawyer. Maybe they’re the same thing.” Also, from this point of view, the common good is considered to be the sum of individual goods, without thinking that there could be any contradiction between two ends that are considered as being good. This is seen in how the avoidance of tragedy is expressed in more personal terms rather than communal terms: what they are trying to avoid is that someone loses a child again, not that the community ends up without a future. Nicole’s parents’ conduct is thereby driven by the preeminence of the individual over that which is communal. They support Stephens’s lawsuit because they are primarily thinking about obtaining compensation money for their daughter’s treatment. Ansel even offers them, in exchange for dropping the lawsuit, the money he has received from his twin’s insurance. “That’s what we used to do, remember? Help each other,” says Billy, “This was a community.” The Burnells do not accept Ansel’s altruistic offer, and when he warns them that the community is about to self-destruct due to the increasing lawsuits, both Sam and Mary respond, “Stay out of it.” They believe that it would be best if everyone moved on. They say, “We’re getting on with our lives, Billy. Maybe it’s time you got on with yours,” as they have done, without considering the fact that there is nothing personal left for Ansel—now a widower, without children, and with his relationship with Risa now over, due to being opposed to one another on the matter of the accident. In short, from this viewpoint, the future and the community do not exist without a refined moral responsibility and the attempt to avoid that a tragedy of this nature is repeated. The future of the community appears as a logical, almost mechanical result of these two conditions. It is not so much that the consequences are not thought about, but how they are thought about: not contradictory nor paradoxical, not problematic, merging what is (facts) and what ought to be (values). This way of representing the problem impedes their considering the possible contradictions between truth and good, or between truth and community.

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Nevertheless, there is some ambivalence here, as can be seen in the story Stephens tells Allison O’Donnell, an old friend of his daughter, on a flight two years after the Sam Dent tragedy. One summer morning, Stephens noticed that Zoe had trouble breathing and her face was swollen. Her trachea was closing up, most likely due to a spider bite; according to the doctor, Stephens had called in his moment of desperation. The doctor also expressed the urgency of the situation and told him to take Zoe to the hospital as quickly as possible. The doctor told him that if they did not arrive on time, Stephens would have to perform a tracheotomy on Zoe with any knife he had on hand, even though it would not be sterile. Stephens took on this responsibility. While his wife was driving, he kept Zoe calm by singing her a lullaby, all the while, knife in hand, in case he had to act quickly. “I was prepared to go all the way,” Mitchell tells Allison. “It was an unforgettable drive,” he remembers, “I was divided into two people. One part of me was Daddy . . . the other part of me was a surgeon.” Finally, the worst never happened. They got to the hospital in time. Stephens’s conduct in this episode is that of someone who acts, knowing the factually fluid and ambiguous—and therefore, morally disconcerting for classical ethics—relation between good and evil. In the first place, this is seen in his experiencing the need to be willing to do an evil without running away from it—as seen in his decision to “go all the way”—and perform a tracheotomy on Zoe in extreme conditions in order to reach a greater good, which would be saving his daughter’s life, all without any guarantee of success. Secondly, in his experiencing the paradoxical depersonalization sometimes required by the pursuit of obtaining good: in order to save that which he most wants, that which is most vital to him, he must for the most part abandon his role as a father, out of such loving intensity, in order to become as cold and distanced as a surgeon, unavoidable prerequisites of the nevertheless scarce chances of success. And finally, in his experiencing, first hand, the mutation of love into hate: Stephens confesses to Allison that the love he had for his daughter—after ten years of helping Zoe with treatments, clinics, and going through all types of unpleasant episodes due to her drug addiction, including AIDS, which she now suffers from—has turned into “steaming piss.” In the same way that Zoe, that summer, “loved us equally then, just like she hates us both equally now,” concludes Mitchell in reference to himself and his wife Klara. Nevertheless, throughout the film, Stephens seems to look at the world through the eyes of duty, as if he believed that, if things were done as they should be done, everything would turn out fine and no one would suffer. “I did everything a loving father of a drug addict is supposed to do,” he says to Allison on the plane. His face was grimacing with disconcertion and disbelief before such an evident failure, almost inexplicable for him. “I will pursue and

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reveal who it was that did not do their job,” he repeats to his Sam Dent clients, referring to the bus. “The word (accident) doesn’t mean anything to me,” he concludes. Stephens has experienced the ethical irrationality of the world—in his daughter’s life, that is, going toward the future. But he does not seem to have assimilated nor assumed it, even despite having been willing to be guided by it. Other traces of political ethics in Stephens are seen in that the target of his lawsuit is not a person (Dolores), but rather, determined institutions (the city, the school, the bus manufacturer). It can be seen also, in that his position could, despite the ethical rationality around it, be based on a greater trust than that of Nicole’s, for example, in the strength of the community itself to restructure and reorganize its existence. This reorganization, however, is not thought of as a communal act, but rather as the fruit of the sum of individual acts; it is thought of, fundamentally, as the restitution of the sense of duty in the people of Sam Dent. Nicole and Ansel’s Position Nicole and Ansel would better represent political ethics, as Machiavelli and Weber do, for various reasons: first, they consider the consequences of the actions they plan to take, accepting their potentially contradictory, paradoxical logic, and they regret the political price paid in terms of the lesser evil, not in terms of an end that justifies the means. In other words, they do evil well; they work with an economy of violence. Nicole, also a victim, does this by placing the salvation of the community over that of her own soul. She knows that in this case, in order to achieve what is most important (the good, from her perspective), she must lie at least two times: before testifying, when she assures Stephens that she will say the truth and nothing but the truth, and during her actual testimony, when she affirms that Dolores was driving seventy-two miles per hour, when she was really going fifty-one. Nicole is conscious of this act. She admits it explicitly at least two times: first, immediately after testifying, when Stephens tells her that she would make a good poker player, she answers, “Thanks,” and secondly, at the end of the film, when she evaluates what has happened and upholds that lying has produced a truth (“Why I lie he only knew, but from my lie this did come true”). Nicole does evil well when she affirms that on the day of the accident, Dolores was driving fast. As she is lying, she is also careful enough not to indicate a number that implies she was going over the speed limit. That way, Dolores appears to have been negligent, but not to have broken the law.

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Furthermore, Nicole paints Dolores as a sensitive person in her testimony by saying that not long before, she had avoided hitting a dog that had crossed the road. Ansel also works with an economy of violence when he threatens the lawyer without witnesses around—in the scene where he finds him filming the inside of the bus—without hitting him. The lawyer’s fear is enough to make him stop insisting on his proposition. The second point to be mentioned here is that they accept the ethical irrationality of the world or fortuna. Ansel does this by accepting it as an accident and defending this idea, for example, in his dialogue with Risa in the motel, as quoted before. Nicole, as mentioned, is not so concerned about whether it was an accident or not, but assumes the need for what happened to be seen as an accident. The accident scene itself produces the effect of proximity and continuity between good and evil. The bus moves calmly along the road with the children inside, playing and having fun, enveloped in the landscape of white snow that surrounds the road on a bright sunny day. To all of this, connoting purity, innocence, joy, harmony, an unperceivable scene takes place, captured with the camera pulling upward, almost shot from the zenith. This, at the same time, presents a certain idea of destiny by suggesting a divine point of view distanced from what is happening, converting that moment of happiness for those who are living it, thus timeless and unique, into a depersonified link in a chain whose tragic ending is just around the bend. And finally, they conceive the contradiction between individual good and the good of the community. Ansel does this at least two times. The first one when he, despite being the only parent who loses two children in the accident—who furthermore represented his whole family since he is a widower— gives privilege to the community when he runs into Stephens, who had just filmed the totaled bus. Billy rejects Stephens’s pretensions of representing him in the cause. And, the second one, when he rejects Nicole’s father’s suggestion of “getting on with their lives,” that is to say, looking out for personal interests (the material amends the trial would bring about) without thinking beyond this; for example, about the fate of common coexistence. Nicole, in turn, accepts the tension between the individual good and the common good and leans toward the latter two times: first, when she initially rejects the idea of the lawsuit her parents discuss with her, despite ending up paralyzed and her career as a rock singer being destroyed; and second, when she lies during her testimony. In short, the future and the community according to this point of view are equal to the ability of forgetting and even forgiving, to uphold the ties of solidarity in order to reconstruct coexistence.

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Nonetheless, some ambivalences or traces of classical ethics can be found in this mindset, like in Stephens’s. Nicole lies in order to save the community, but by doing this she knows that she runs the risk of condemning Dolores by claiming that she was driving fast that day. This is what ends up happening. Two years later, Dolores appears working out of town. Nicole knew her well and was convinced that the children were the most important things in her life. Nevertheless, Dolores is depicted in her new life as a person who has recovered the happiness she had before the accident, and seems not to carry the weight of the collective accusation on her shoulders. All of this contrasts with the interview scene with Stephens, in her house, shortly after the tragedy (Dolores is still wearing a neck brace), when she finds herself stuck in the past before the accident, represented by the photos of the dead children that cover the large wall in her living room. Nicole’s position, although closer to accepting the logic of politics and collective life for everything mentioned before, could, however, be viewed as placing less trust in the ability of the community alone to rebuild itself. It acts inconsiderately and stems from the supposed idea that the community, that which must be saved, is what it is, as if it could only conceive this salvation in terms of untouched preservation of what is given. For Nicole, the future, in this sense, would be untouched continuity of the past and the present, when, on the other hand, her act of salvation is based on burying the past and the present so that the future can live on. Saving the Community and Sense of Responsibility: Its Limits as Political-ethical Criteria The political ethics of Machiavelli and Weber seem to present few doubts about who works in an ethical way and who does not in this case. There are fundamentally two evaluative criteria: (1) either the individual soul is saved or the community is saved, and (2) either one considers the potential paradoxical and contradictory consequences of their actions in relation to the proposal that motivates them, or one acts with the idea that honesty, good, and truth will always triumph. This relative certainty is precisely what suggests the need to think against this conclusion. Because it intuitively seems necessary to revise both criteria, since (a) there seems to be something not politically ethical about Nicole’s actions, and it does not definitely consist in her lying, and something politically ethical in Stephens’s actions, which does not lie in the search for the truth as such; and (b) the notion of “saving the community” does not seem

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problematized. Indeed, “community” is too close to the classical idea of “common good,” carrying with it the same paradoxical mix of conceptual haziness, and at the same time the argumentative certainty with which it was (and still is) used in the Western tradition for centuries. The corresponding questions, then, would be, with respect to the first point: Is Nicole and Ansel’s position politically ethical simply because it attends to the responsibility of its actions? Is Stephens’s position not politically ethical simply because he does not consider the consequences of his actions in terms of community life? What happens when someone upholds some undesirable ends/values in a responsible way? What does the Weberian ethics of responsibility tell us about this? Regarding the second point: What does “saving the community” mean? What does “community” mean? What or who must be saved in order to be able to affirm that the “community” has been saved? Is the concept of “community” not, perhaps, a more controversial and problematic concept in definition than the certainty with which political ethics accepts it as a presupposition of its reflection? In short, do Machiavelli and Weber’s political ethics allow for us to contemplate these questions? The Question of the Meaning of “Community” Machiavelli and Weber’s political ethics do not seem to be able to problematize the meaning itself of the concept of “community” and thus the question of what its salvation consists in. Machiavelli and Weber relativize political ends because they start from the idea that good can beget evil, and therefore their ethical-political criteria is that lesser evils avoid greater evils. This rests on attributing the value of the greater evil to the loss of the community. The salvation of the community is identified with the supreme good because these political ethics assume the republican supposition that there cannot be any free individuals, nor can they achieve their ends outside of the free and autonomous community that includes them, and therefore, the fall of the community implies the fall of each and every individual project—even the selfish ones—that inhabit it, thus being the greater evil. But even accepting this republican premise and its value as ethical-political criteria does not alone explain what saving the community consists in. The meaning of this concept has been taken for granted, almost as if it were considered self-evident. It has not been problematized whether or not saving implies preserving what was intact, that is, if the saved community is the same as the community that was in danger, if it can only be saved at the cost of modifying it, or even if modifying it is a requisite of saving it. If this is not problematized, the

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concept in question remains depoliticized, neutralized in the sense that its polysemy, its polemical content, is not analyzed. One reason for this potential depoliticization seems to be found in that according to Machiavelli and Weber, the ethical conflict of politics lies more in having to choose between the individual good and the common good, rather than being obliged to choose between different meanings of common good. The choice between different political ends is present in Max Weber. The fight for values is the foundation of politics. But nevertheless, for Weber, the central problem of ethical politics does not lie there, although it forms part of it. This central problem for Weber is, however, found in the internal tension of the subject that decides between his or her own good and that of the community: accepting the use of specific political means (violence and power) and having a sense of responsibility for carrying the weight of the consequences of one’s decisions. In Machiavelli, the pluralism, more than linked to the presence of different meanings of the common good, lies in the existence of two ethical paths between which one must choose: ethics aimed toward being a good individual and that which leads to being a good citizen (and/or politician). The ethical price imposed by politics, for these thinkers, seems to be concentrated in being able to condemn one’s own soul in the pursuit of saving the city, of measuring up to the decision of combat and, if necessary, sacrifice those members of the community who want to put their own individual good before the common good, and respond with force to the other communities who want to impose their own common good on one’s community. In other words, the ethical-political problem is posed either in the realm of subjectivity, as the subject’s internal tension between the individual and the citizen, or in the communitarian realm, between the citizen and others who act as individuals rather than as citizens, and between citizens and foreigners. But this does not exclude the other posed problem, seen less in Machiavelli than in Weber: the ethical conflict of politics lies in facing the choice between various common goods or between elements that all form part of the common good, and, therefore, what must be set aside or sacrificed is not only that which impedes the achievement of the common good (saving the soul), but rather, that which also constitutes it; in other words, in the communitarian realm as a conflict between and among citizens. When Nicole chooses to save the community, she is not only choosing between common interest and personal interest. The salvation of the community does not only require the sacrifice of the salvation of her soul (carried out through lies), that of the individual selfish interests of the other members of the community, incapable of prioritizing the good in this (the families that follow Stephens), or that of

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a foreigner who looks to redeem himself for his personal problems at the cost of Sam Dent (as could be the case of Stephens himself ). The salvation of the community that Nicole undertakes demands the sacrifice of an important part of the common good, symbolized by the character of Dolores. Indeed, the salvation of the community supposes community life without Dolores,7 without suffering, but also without her person, which is an impossibility—her absence is painful. This fully represents the contradiction between the common good and a part of this same good that jeopardizes the act itself of saving the community. At the end of the film, when Nicole asks if Stephens understands that now all the townspeople, including Dolores and the children who have died, form a new community, she looks to solve this ethicalpolitical problem by means of a concept of community that reminds us of that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, an alliance between ancestors, the living and those to come. Including all those who have formed part of the community within this is equivalent to eluding its partial, polysemic, metonymic character. Indeed, “community” and “saving the community” would form part of those concepts that, like town, nation, identity, or state, cannot be perceived if not through the rhetorical figures that name them. The central figure in political language, that of political science as well as that of political activity as such, is metonymy, that is to say, taking the part for the whole (Hammar 2005, 23–32). The inevitability of taking the part for the whole and, at the same time, how this figure theoretically limits thought, in this case, on the relation between ethics and politics, is also brought about another way. In fact, if we start with Machiavellian and Weberian concepts, such as fortuna or the Ethical Irrationality of the World—viewing the world as a factual reality and not as essentially moral, without a given inherent sense, but rather one that must be created by and given by man—then the inevitable result is that of pluralism. This includes the meaning of the concepts of “community” and “saving the community.” Therefore, they find themselves condemned to being one part, one particularity, which names the whole. The whole is unnamable as such, or it is provided that it is not a whole. These concepts, then, do not seem to be involved in controversy and in the fight for meaning only because there are opposite concepts put forth, in logical tension with them, like saving one’s soul, but rather because they are also challenged by other meanings of community and saving the community. Eluding the metonymic character of the concept of community entails setting aside the necessarily decisionist8 element present within its definition. It presents the plurality of meanings as harmonizable, reducing the polemic to mere deliberation, with which all transformation remains reabsorbed in

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the imaginary permanence of the community as equal to itself. Saving and reinventing, therefore, constitute one concept. The definition of the common good cannot be but the work of one particularity, it cannot be but one meaning among others. This, now, does not imply taking value away from the salvation of the city as ethical-political criteria, nor does it equate it to the salvation of the soul, but rather calls attention to the problem implied by deciding on what this end consists in, and to the symbolic violence that this decision entails (see Braud 2004, 177–240). Thus, it involves placing the definition of the common good in the same territory as any other political end or value: in the void of objective groundlessness. Which, in the end, does nothing more than increase the dramatization of the relation between ethics and politics, since it has no predefined element, no sustaining base assured a priori. The Problem of Responsibility Max Weber’s political ethics seems not to be able to respond, or at least not in an intuitively satisfactory way, to the question: What happens when someone upholds undesirable ends/values in a responsible way? Is this action politically ethical? In this respect, Weber circumscribes the criteria of ethical politics to responsibility with respect to the consequences without paying more attention to the content of the value for that which one is responsible, given that values are scientifically undecidable or unfounded. For Weber, political ethics is found more in how the values are lived out rather than what those values are. Weber deduces from the scientifically unfounded character of values that their content does not affect the ethical evaluation of the action: since one is not able to know for sure if a value is good or evil, one does not consider it as criteria for evaluating the action, and one circumscribes the responsibility that the actor has with respect to the consequences of his acts, since one can analyze this scientifically (calculation of probabilities). The central problem that appears here is that political ethics does not seem to be capable of being limited to the responsibility of the actor with respect to the consequences his actions have for his cause. If this were the case, reasoning obliges one to say that the action of an actor or community to consequently pursue the extermination of another is ethical, and that one who lives out peace and international cooperation with absolute conviction is not ethical. Or, for example, that the only criticism in terms of political ethics of a policy of systematic extermination would be not having consequently planned out its action: the only thing that we could reject in ethical-political terms about German

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National Socialism was not having thought out the German army’s real possibilities of triumph when invading the Soviet Union. Weber does not consider it valid to base the ethical-political rejection of an action on the content of the value that guides it, since for him, it is not possible to scientifically prove it demonstrative that a value is good or evil. It is true that it is impossible to scientifically base values, nevertheless this does not necessarily imply that we cannot say anything or that we must only speak in terms of formal ethics, that is, circumscribed to the consequences of the action. Furthermore, the ethical-political criteria itself of responsibility and of the lesser evil/greater evil would require that we add to this the argument on which values are ethical for our political action. Because only by constructing a hierarchical table of values, although unfounded, relative and conditional, is it possible to evaluate which evil is lesser and which evil is greater in every circumstance and context of action. The argument about values is key in Weber’s reflection, precisely because they are unfounded (the fight for values channeled through a plebiscitary leader democracy). However, the choice or preference of values as well as the public argument around them represent a moment of freedom and individualization of the subjects, not a space for scientific reflection. In other words, what predominates in such a context is faith and belief, not a demonstrative and conclusive rationality. Therefore, this fight is eternal and irresolvable. Weber, in short, looks to establish political ethics on science, identified with true knowledge. This brings him, insofar as part of the scientifically unfounded character of values, to delimit political ethics to a sense of responsibility with respect to the consequences of the actions for the value that guides them without considering the value for which one is responsible. Therein lies the achievements and the limits, the necessary, yet, at the same time, insufficient character of his reflection. In the film, perhaps Stephens’s position is defensible. What is not, however, is the way he does it. On the contrary, Nicole’s position may not be defensible, but the way she does it is. Conclusion At the end of this journey, through the relation between ethics and politics, it is possible to extract some conclusions. Indeed, (1) political ethics, according to Machiavelli and Weber, is necessary but insufficient. It is necessary because it more effectively grasps what type of good is distinctive to politics, what the world in which politics takes place is like, and what politics as an activity and as knowledge entails. It is insufficient because it does not consider some problems that arise from the relation between the traits that political ethics itself

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has been able to identify as political characteristics, (a) the relation between the common good, pluralism, and world: the question of the definition of the sense of “saving the community”; and (b) the relation between values, the world, and politics: the problem of the ethics of responsibility. Moreover, (2) in order to be coherent with that which has been affirmed in the first point, it must be shown that the insufficiencies emphasized here are posed in the field of political ethics, not classical ethics. Regarding point (a), it is possible to uphold that if we start with the idea that in politics, the search for the common good prevails in a world void of inherent sense and characterized by the plurality of values that are not objective, then the definition of common good cannot but form part of the fight for values as well. The fight, and its consequent ethical-political tension in terms of physical and symbolic violence, is not only apparent between the common good and the private individual good, but also between different common goods. Here one of the premises of the factual vision of the world that pluralism poses is fulfilled: good things can be contradictory. Regarding point (b), it can be affirmed that circumscribing ethical criteria of action to the evaluation of the formal responsibility of the bearer with respect to his cause, obliges us to formulate ethical-political judgments that are intuitively absurd; for example, considering the responsible pursuit of the extermination of one community by another to be ethical. Finally, (3) the political ethics of Machiavelli and Weber has been prolific and consistent, mainly in its dispute with classical ethics. In this sense, it was and still is theoretically necessary, even while classical ethics continues to carry important weight when viewing the world and politics. It has allowed for the axis of the debate to change in order to lay the foundations for the political debate on ethics by opposing the individual internal idea of the salvation of the soul, the collective idea of the salvation of the community, and the rules of a world given an inherent and ethically rational sense. This is a clinical vision according to which the world is a factual reality devoid of inherent ethical sense. Nevertheless, the construction of political ethics is not resolved once the polemic with classical ethics has been clarified. Not all of its problems can be posed in terms of the collective/individual ethics dichotomy, but rather others appear within collective or political ethics themselves. Both Machiavelli and Weber reflected on political ethics in an intellectual context marked by the hegemony of classical ethics. Perhaps this is why their main effort was focused on strongly affirming the central pillars of these ethics. That, and certain traits common to both thinkers in terms of nationalism, statism, and the identifying of politics with personal leadership, as well as Weber’s tendency to

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take his concept of ethics only as far as science would allow, could be among the determining factors that (respectively) minimized the issue posed inside political ethics. This is precisely due to the extremely prolific path they paved. From this, it can also be derived—and is worth insisting on—that the insufficiencies of political ethics do not have as much to do with the challenges that classical ethics presents, but more so with those that appear once one thinks in terms of political ethics. References Berlin, Isaiah. 1981. The originality of Machiavelli. In Against the current: Essays in the history of ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, 25–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braud, Philippe. 2004. Violencias políticas. Madrid: Alianza. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The philosophy of horror or paradoxes of the heart. London: Routledge. Franzé, Javier. 2003. El criterio ético de Maquiavelo. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 642: 63–76. Hammar, Björn. 2005. Teoría política, retórica y tropología. Metapolítica 9 (44): 23–32. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1969a. De principatibus. In Opere politiche, ed. Mario Puppo, 45–181. Firenze: Le Monnier. ———. 1969b. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. In Opere politiche, ed. Mario Puppo, 185–642. Firenze: Le Monnier. Schmitt, Carl. 1922/1985. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab, 32. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Skinner, Quentin. 2000. Machiavelli: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1995. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1919/1997a. Politics as a vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. London: Routledge. ———. 1917/1997b. Science as a vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. London: Routledge.

Notes 1. Translated by Victoria Fontana. I would like to thank Benjamin Arditi and Naomi Sussmann for helpful comments on this chapter. 2. The Sweet Hereafter by Atom Egoyan (director, producer, screenplay), 1997. Canada, 112 minutes. Based on the novel by Russell Banks. More information at http://www.egofilmarts.com and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120255/ fullcredits#cast (accessed March 23, 2007). 3. Loosely taken here from the concept of horror-art by Carroll (1990, chap. 1).

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4. The characterization that Isaiah Berlin (1981, 25–79) made is used in order to make this distinction. The central notion Machiavelli distinguishes is upheld, not between ethics and politics, but between political ethics and ethics that are inappropriate for politics. The difference for Berlin lies in the fact that he identifies this other nonpolitical ethics with “Judeo-Christian ethics,” while in this work it is preferable, according to Skinner (2000, 35–47), to say “classical ethics.” Classical ethics can be understood as that which was elaborated throughout different historical eras from the reflections of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Cicero, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. 5. Machiavelli 1969a, XXV. On the paradoxical relation between good and evil in politics, see: Machiavelli 1969b, I, 9; II, 8, 14. On the difference between the concept of Fortuna used by Machiavelli and that of Christianity, see Skinner 2000, 26–31. 6. Isaiah Berlin (1981, 62, 64) defines Machiavelli’s ethical-political criteria as “the end ‘excuses’ the means” and in terms of lesser evils avoid greater evils (“The qualities of the lion and the fox are not in themselves morally admirable, but if a combination of these qualities will alone preserve the city from destruction, then these are the qualities that leaders must cultivate,” 51). We believe that both criteria involve different concepts as a prudent ethical-political rule. The decisive factor is that “the end ‘excuses’ the means” would be the traditional vision of Machiavelli as “Machiavellian” or “master of evil” (see Strauss 1995), although Berlin does not use it in this sense. Indeed, the evaluation of lesser evils and greater evils would be more representative of that which Berlin himself presents. For a discussion on this point in Berlin, see Franzé 2003, 63–76. 7. “Dolores,” female proper name derived from the singular Latin word “dolor,” meaning, “sorrow/pain.” 8. In the sense of Carl Schmitt, as a decision “that emanates from nothingness” (1985, 32).

PART 4

The Terror of Theory

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CHAPTER 11

The Violence of Lying Olivia Guaraldo

The Pentagon Papers Scandal

I

t was 1971 when Hannah Arendt first published in the New York Review of Books her essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (Arendt, in Arendt 1972, 3–47). The essay commented on the recent publication of the forty-seven-volume “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy” (commissioned by Secretary of State Robert S. McNamara in June 1967 and completed a year and a half later). The scandal at the core of the publication of this report had to do with the fact that it was not meant to be published, at least not in the way that the New York Times (NYT) got hold of it. The above report became widely known as the Pentagon Papers and was, in fact, a “top-secret, richly documented record of the American role in Indochina from World War II to May 1968” (Arendt 1972, 3). The embarrassment of the Nixon administration—which, shortly thereafter, had to deal with another, more infamous scandal—in receiving the news that the public had become informed of the years of lies and deception in Vietnam was observable in its futile attempt to silence Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon “expert” and member of the Rand Corporation who was responsible for leaking the report to the New York Times). The NYT scoop of the Pentagon Papers preceded the Washington Post revelations on the Watergate Building infraction, with the consequences that we are all familiar with. Those were the days, we could say, when the revelation of a scandal mattered, when public opinion was still receptive, aware, and able to respond and react to lying, deception, and misconduct of those in power. But what did these forty-seven volumes tell the American public? Surprisingly, they did not reveal any hidden information, any secret complot,

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anything that was not already known to the majority of the citizens. As in fact Arendt herself notes, the report “contains nothing to support the theory of grandiose imperialist stratagems,” and again, the “Pentagon Papers revealed little significant news that was not available to the average reader of dailies and weeklies” (Arendt 1972, 45). One of the moral qualities of the report consisted instead in the will of the so-called Pentagon experts to produce an impartial self-examination and an objective analysis of their deeds. These experts or “problem solvers”—who were asked to evaluate the policies they had been proposing and implementing—had been “drawn into government from the universities and the various think tanks” (9–10), they were men of science, learned experts “in love with theory.” One of their main peculiarities, in fact, was their reliance on game theories and system analyses, and they were “eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudomathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them” (11). What was at the core of the scandal, according to Arendt—who reports the words of Daniel Ellsberg, “How could they?”—was the systematic denial, on the experts’ side, of factual reality as it came to them from intelligence information. The lying that was to be found at the foundation of the U.S. Vietnam policy did not consist in hiding some secret plans from the American public, but in neglecting substantial factual information, in pretending that theory could prevail over facts. In order to remain consistent with their theories—based on mathematical calculations, game theories, and other abstract criteria—the problem solvers neglected simple and solid facts. For example, they neglected the absence of any connection between China and the Soviet Union (which would have been a justification for the Vietnam War as a containment of China, and a proof of the existence of a solid and consistent Communist block). In addition, they also neglected the absence of any strategic interest in “liberating Vietnam” from the “Communist menace” (intelligence reports told President Johnson in 1964 “with the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam”). Further along these lines, the “global” provenance of the South-Vietnamese insurgency—another justification for the war as being “imported” to South Vietnam by foreign communists—had been dismissed by the CIA, which reported in 1961 and in 1963 that “the primary sources of Communist strength in South Vietnam are indigenous” (Arendt 1972, 25, quoting the Papers).

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Facts and Theories What is at stake here, according to Arendt, is not simply the traditional use of lying in the sphere of power, the use of secrecy in order to achieve specific political ends, the well-known practice of arcana imperii, but the construction of a reality that is, so to say, fictitious, deprived of its basic elements— facts—in order to comply with a theory, according to which the experts and decision makers should have been able to discover “laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts, as though they were as necessary, and thus reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be” (1972, 11). The problem, says Arendt, is that political science, in contrast to the natural sciences, deals with contingent facts, and “reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions” (12). Therefore the scientific, or pseudoscientific attitude with which the Pentagon experts neglected facts in order to make a theory or hypothesis come true resembles the philosopher’s will to “eliminate the accidental,” as Hegel would say. Hannah Arendt’s entire body of work has been devoted to fighting this “speculative” attitude—that which desperately seeks to eliminate the accidental—in the sphere of politics. The problem of the Western political tradition is that it does not have what Arendt calls a “pure notion of the political,” thereby meaning that every attempt at interpreting, understanding, and changing political reality has always been characterized by an excessively theoretical approach. The Pentagon Papers in this respect represent the governmental, scientific, up-to-date version of the Hegelian aversion to contingency. The philosopher reflects ex-post upon reality (according to Hegel’s famous definition, philosophy is like the owl of Minerva, which “spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk”) and aims at comprehending it in “his” system in order to posthumously eliminate contingency, while the political theorist and expert is not only a “man” of thought but also a “man” of action. He has neither the contemplative attitude of the philosopher nor the meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality of the natural scientist, who deals with matters that are not necessarily man-made (the sexist language here is deliberate and is clarified toward the end of this chapter). The political scientist deals with matters that are man-made and, more often than not, is tempted to not simply observe the world of human affairs, but also to change them, to make them conform to a certain theoretical model he has in mind. The man of action who is also a man of thought because he deals with accidental things— things that could have been otherwise—is constantly tempted to eliminate the potential contingency of political reality by means of making it fit into theory. These basic reflections brought Arendt to consider the issue of lying

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in politics not as a moral question, but as an epistemological one. Arendt’s implicit message seems to hint at the following judgment: willful and deliberate ignorance of facts, rather than being mistaken in their evaluation, is much more dangerous than willful lying. Politics and the Freedom of Lying As a matter of fact, Arendt, following Aristotle, considers politics as the sphere of contingency, of things that “could be otherwise.” It is therefore an eminently political possibility to undo that which exists in order to start something new. Not differently from the great father of the strategic use of lying in politics, Machiavelli, Arendt is persuaded that there is a strict link between politics as the art of changing reality and lying as the art of imagining things that are not there. Arendt writes, “We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’—not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition—no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of ” (1972, 5–6). Politics, in other words, has nothing to do with stable criteria, rigid and unchangeable, according to which one should govern reality. On the contrary, politics is the constant attempt to elaborate visions of reality that are different from the existent ones. Imagination is the instrument through which the political agent can obliterate a given reality and produce a vision of the new. “In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination” (5). To act and to lie are therefore strictly interrelated, insofar as politics is the sphere of contingency, of things that “could be otherwise.” On the other hand, though, politics has to do with facts, with the concrete and material taking place of events, that, as such, can hardly be ignored or dismissed. In a previous essay, entitled Truth and Politics, Arendt reports a sentence uttered by French Prime Minister Clemenceau, who said, when asked about the responsibilities for the initiation of World War I, that is, what the historians would eventually report, “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say that Belgium invaded Germany” (Arendt 1968, 239). Politics, in other words, has to do with the radical possibility of change— through imagination and action—and the equally strong persistence of events, facts that happened and as such cannot be denied. Political actors must be aware of this duplicity, and must, so to say, act accordingly.

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Imagination, according to Arendt, is connected to human freedom, insofar as it is a mental faculty that relies upon human spontaneity. By reinterpreting Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Arendt refers to imagination as the most “political” of our mental faculties, in that through imagination we can practice what she calls “enlarged thinking,” namely the possibility to make present in our minds different standpoints and reproduce mentally the different perspectives that constitute political reality (1982). Imagination can give us the possibility to broaden our individual perspective by assuming a different standpoint, by accepting within our mental framework possible heterogeneous paths of meaning. Politically speaking, we could say that if imagination gives us the opportunity to imagine things that are literally not there—to deny factual reality in order to change it—it does so not by shaping a fictitious reality that should work as a substitute, but simply by making us aware of the contingent nature of political reality. It can help us understand different standpoints, allowing us to think with others and not in solitude—and by so doing it can produce nonexistent visions of reality that can guide us in our political actions. In fact imagination—as Arendt understands it—is linked to the plurality of humankind, to the fact that each being is unique and different from every other, and offers the chance to practice this plurality in one’s mind. It is not by chance that Arendt considered storytelling as a means to understand past political events by virtue of its capacity to offer a fictional rumination on events that often allowed a better understanding of reality than simple historiographic cause-effect explanations. Political reality—the sphere of human affairs—ta ton anthropon pragmata—in its plurality and contingency, is the sphere of the unexpected, of the unpredictable, and as such cannot be accounted for in mechanical terms for the result may be too simplistic and reductive. Storytelling, instead, offers us a different way of understating such political reality, a way that respects its contingency and unexpectedness. Imagination, in this respect, plays a crucial role, since it can help us build stories that, as such, are more faithful to reality than any objective and therefore scientific report. Creative literary imagination, for example, can help us understand decisive political phenomena better than a causal explanation based on a supposedly scientific argument: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness tells us more about imperialism than any history textbook, Proust’s Recherce is more significant than any sociological interpretation on the role of the intellectual in nineteenth-century France, and so on. The political use of fiction, as Arendt adopts it, has to do with the necessity of elaborating different means of understanding reality that do not reduce it to a stereotype, to a muster, nor to statistical data, but seeks instead to come to terms with its essential unpredictability (for good and for bad; Arendt 1951; 1958; see also

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Disch 1994; Guaraldo 2001). Whereas imagination literarily performed can be politically interesting and useful, fictive productions that are based simply on calculated schemes and theories can be politically disastrous. The Physiology and Pathology of Lying There is, in fact, a different use of fiction that, as such, is politically dangerous, and it comes down to the abuse of another mental faculty, that of logical reasoning. When shaped in order to radically deny reality in its factuality and contingency, logical reasoning can produce nonexistent visions of reality that, as such, are ready and packed, uncontestable in force of the purported cogency of the scientific method. The fictions produced by this type of mental activity radically violate the principle of contingency that informs the political sphere. In the first case—that of imagination, a faculty radically alien to the proceedings of logical reasoning—the fictions of the mind guide political actors in their will to modify the present iuxta propria pincipia, namely, respecting the contingency and plurality of politics. In the second case—that of logical reasoning—the fictions of the mind are meant to substitute reality and its contingency. This is to say that there can be a physiological use of lying in the sphere of politics that relates to the possibility of change and novelty (for Arendt, the very essence of the political) and a pathological one, where what is at stake is not the instrumental and occasional use of lying, but a systematic, deliberate production of a fictive reality, disregarding both contingency and factuality. The scandal of the Pentagon Papers, in other words, testifies to this pathology, which, in the end, can be defined as the systematic abuse of fiction in the sphere of politics. Imagining a different world does not equate to building a fictitious one. There is, in other words, a radical difference between innovative—even revolutionary—political actions and the totalitarian experiment of fabricating a new reality, through ideology, propaganda, and terror. That is to say, given the Arendtian framework, the “revelations” of the Pentagon Papers told the American public then, and tell us still today, two major things. First, the theories of the problem solvers, surprisingly enough, were not concerned with the pursuit of some decisive national interest in South Asia, nor did they have to do with the welfare of the nation, but rather simply with its image. In fact, what strikes the reader is that among the evershifting justifications for the war, what remains stable is the question of American “credibility,” its image as a world superpower. What emerges, therefore, is an interesting new kind of “banality of evil” where what is at stake is not the normal, ordinary nature of evildoers (as it had been in the case of the many Eichmanns under Nazi rule in Germany), but the ignorant,

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mediocre political quality of the officials leading the United States of America. The reason for twenty years of war, massacres, and destruction was not the greedy and imperialistic policy of the superpower, but its stubbornness in following the game theories of some think-tank experts. The parody of a cold war conflict, as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, seems more plausible than reality itself. Second, what emerges from the report is the fact that no free country is immune from what one could call a totalitarian drive, which consists not only in the desire to manipulate public opinion through deliberate lies, but also in fabricating a new reality in which facts are manipulated either by being inserted into a general scheme of explanation that “eliminates the accidental” or by being constructed anew. This was what ideology did under totalitarian rule: it offered an image of reality that contained no element of contingency, but instead, inserted every single fact into the logic of an idea, fabricating a consistent reality that as such did not exist. (For extended treatments on this state of affairs in the totalitarian regimes of Romania and Chile, and China, respectively, see the chapters of C. Preda and M. Valjakka in this volume.) People seemed to be satisfied with a view of reality that “made sense” while the world outside seemed to have lost its sense. The totalitarian abuse of fiction is well known, and that political experiment warns us of the difference between simple, occasional lying—as some sort of indispensable instrumentum regni—and a systematic denial of facts, which opens up the viability of a violent substitution of reality with a consistent fictional scheme. One could even say that totalitarians abused fiction to the point that what they constructed as ideology was then implemented by terror, and the fiction eventually became true. Even if one should be very cautious about comparing totalitarian regimes and democratic government, it is nevertheless palpable that Arendt, when speaking of the Pentagon experts, detects in them a very dangerous totalitarian inclination. What in fact emerges at the end of Arendt’s reflections on the Pentagon Papers is that the political scientists who were in “love with theories,” mostly theories substantiated by calculations and numbers rather than views of the world, had been the disciples of the cold-war ideologists, the anti-Communists who determined the comprehensive ideology of Washington since World War II. They had been former Communists, and this is why, says Arendt, they “needed a new ideology by which to explain and reliably foretell the course of history” (1972, 39). The love for theory stems not simply from a scientific approach to reality—that of the Pentagon experts—but from familiarity with consistent manipulation of facts, as was the case of the antiCommunists at work in Washington. For Arendt, anti-Communism is no less an ideology than Communism, and as such, it contains all the failures of

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a monolithic, simplistic, yet appealing view of reality. The political use of a monolithic view of reality—the ideological fiction—is treacherous because it goes far beyond mere lying, or hiding of the truth. Another mechanism is at work here: in order to comply with a consistent view of reality, the ideological interpretation tends to accept as factual truth that which instead is part of a theory, a logical construction that covers reality. The banality of the theories at work in the U.S. Vietnam policy—the theories of the problem solvers, who, unlike their former teachers, did not have any ideologically comprehensive view of history but simply dealt with the image of the United States—does not diminish their politically lethal effect. “Sheer ignorance of facts, deliberate neglect of postwar developments” became the hallmark of the cold war anti-Communist doctrine first and then of the so-called problem solvers of the Vietnam War: “They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored” (1972, 39). At the core of this love of theory, be it an ideological view of the world or simply a domino theory according to which the situation in Vietnam would determine the situation in the neighboring countries, is the inability to cope with contingency, to deal with factual experience as a source for decision making. The banality of evil reached in Vietnam a new level of absurdity: the goals of the war as such were as hypothetical and volatile as the policies that implemented it. Does this story tell us something more? It tells us that that level of absurdity, of deliberate manipulation of facts was insane, lethal, and politically wrong. Game theories and system analyses caused heavy losses in terms of human lives and economic resources, not to speak of the hundreds of thousands of civilian Vietnamese who died. Yet it tells us more. Lying and Violence Arendt always warned against easy analogies in the sphere of political history, since she believed that politics and history both had to do with the new and the unexpected, for which there can be no comparison to or assimilation of precedents. The temptation is too strong, since those reflections seem to offer a way that enables us to read the present. One could therefore say that comparisons with the past are useful insofar as they simply allow us to detect differences and discover novelties, shifts in that contingent reality of which politics is made. Besides the fact that now, as then, what seems to be at stake is the “unbelievable example of using excessive means to achieve minor aims” (instead of the intended “limited means to achieve excessive ends”), using Arendt today can help us in understanding that the political abuse of a

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fictional mental construction, or ideology—which negates existent factual information and produces non existent ones—can reach an even more absurd level of banality of evil, or worse, in its potential effects, than that of the Pentagon “expertise” on Vietnam. (Parenthetically the domino theory would probably be more adequate now than previously to explain the effects of the Washington policy in the Middle East.) The mental attitude of today’s Washington experts—more familiar perhaps with the anti-Communist ideology of the cold war than with the problem solvers’ mathematical attitude—is no less irresponsible, no less defactualized, no less ignorant of facts, no less disregarding of information and experience collected by the intelligence in the Middle East. Nevertheless, those game theories and system analyses, the tools of the political scientists of the prestigious think tanks, are nothing compared to today’s innovative awareness of the political importance of a systematic abuse of fiction.1 In an unprecedented coalition of media, governments, informed public, and terrorists what is at stake today is not only the act of defactualizing reality and deliberately ignoring stubborn facts, historical situations, and regional specificities, but a much more creative act of invention: that which fabricates evidence together with visions of the world, and homogeneously and innocently broadcasts them.2 If the problem of the Vietnam War was that of ignoring the facts that stood against a successful conclusion of the conflict, and pretending that goals had been achieved, now the political use of deception has reached a new level: the justification for war relies on facts that, as such, are made up, fabricated since they do not exist in reality. Fictitious evidences go along with fictitious terrorist alliances, where the power of logical reasoning, based on fake causes but engendering powerful real effects, has literally swept away complex political situations, different religious contexts, and contingent possible effects of a strategically wrong invasion.3 There is an even more lethal abuse of fiction in the Islamist ideology that conceives of the West as a monolithic empire of sinners and apostates. The pathological use of fiction is evident in those attempts to trace a monolithic history of both “East” and “West”—two opposite fictional entities fabricated as internally homogeneous. On both sides of the fence there are elements that seem to coalesce together in making the prophecy of a clash of civilizations come true. The relationship between theory and reality, though, is reversed, and the latter is not simply adjusted to the former—through lying, deception, neglecting of facts—but the former dictates the means by which to fabricate the latter. It goes without saying that both these fabrications lead to an endless destruction.

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Domesticating Dissent Yet there are compelling differences between past and present situations, and, historically speaking, today’s ideological impetus is essentially different from the ideologies and theories that informed the Washington administration at the time of the Vietnam War. “The problem solvers did not judge, they calculated” (1972, 37), says Arendt, but what made their calculations differ from the ideological purports of today’s neoconservative ideology is essentially this: the former relied on the evidence of mathematical, purely rational truth while the latter has transformed the rational choice argument into a religious, moral one. Truth no longer reveals itself as a mathematical formula but through moral statements, blatantly colored with vague religious undertones.4 The fabrication of reality relies upon unverifiable truths, and this is why perhaps today, differently from the times of the Vietnam War, the importance of facts, and their acknowledgment, does not play any major political role. The pathology of contemporary political lies no longer depends on simple logical reasoning, violently applied to reality, but on the combination of moral, religious premises and instrumental, cause-effect system analyses. The fictions become more powerful in the face of the religious premises on which they are construed. Moreover, the principles of Western democracies, virtuously embodied by American democracy, become matters of faith; they undergo, so to speak, some sort of essentialization: the expansion of democracy, the liberation of Islamic women, the infinite detention of suspects at Guantanamo. All these instances are examples of a religious belief in American, Western values, and a subsequent criminalization of those who do not comply with them. Democracy transformed into a religion still implies a secular use of its implements of violence: both symbolic and material. Therefore, in spite of the religious rhetoric of its leaders, Western politics continues to act according to its essentially modern structures. In the current global disorder of violence, state sovereignty has not renounced the secular premises on which it was founded: the monopoly on violence, the final decision on the state of exception, the claim to legitimate authority. To what extent these premises can still function and produce order—as in modernity—is easily discernible. (On this, see Guaraldo, forthcoming.) One further significant difference, in fact, and perhaps the most telling, has to do with the way in which public opinion has become—so to speak— domesticated, ceasing to exercise a significant role. Public opinion has progressively become a passive subject, unable to become outraged, even after the evident lies have been revealed. It is as if today, differently from then, we were witnessing a much more efficacious and successful fictional construction able

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to substitute for reality. It is as if, in other words, the optimistic conviction Arendt expressed at the time, that no fictitious construction can be as great as to cover and conceal reality in its totality, would have really faded away. What we are witnessing today is the political effectiveness of fictions—ideological and mediatized—even in the face of the revelations of their falsity. The publicity that should characterize the public sphere—the Kantian and Habermasian öffentlichkeit that should guarantee correctness and transparence of information and decision processes—is still effectual insofar as the lies and fictional constructions of the Bush and Blair administrations have come to the fore. Public opinion has, now as it did then, the possibility to verify facts but the revelations of the lies do not have meaningful consequences.5 In the case of the Pentagon Papers scandal, the role of public opinion—and most of all of the press—was decisive and Arendt herself wrote, “So long as the press is free and not corrupt, it has an enormously important function to fulfil and can rightly be called the fourth branch of government.” But she seemed to perceive the frailty of that so-called fourth branch. She wrote, “Whether the first amendment will suffice to protect this most essential political freedom, the right to unmanipulated factual information without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax, is another question” (1972, 45). Today, on the contrary, public opinion has ceased to exercise its critical role, has been reduced to a mediatized form of acquiescence that takes the shape of the “opinion poll.” Political activism has been substituted with the passivity of the consumer of opinions and news, and apparent total information—every hour, everywhere, on everything—eventually coincides with a total lack of political action. The passive news-consumer is falsely convinced of participating in the flow of events, while she is simply enjoying a media spectacle. Arendt, at the time of the scandal, criticized the “Madison Avenue mentality” of the Pentagon experts, their “public relations” attitude, concerned with the image, rather than the real needs of America. Today that “public relations” mentality seems to have colonized entirely our public sphere, as if all of us would be content with a glossy, magazine-style version of the war and its justifications. The media representations, which have accompanied the beginning and the official conclusion of the war, seemed to be forged according to entertainment criteria. “Showdown Iraq” was the obsessive refrain that CNN had chosen to describe the preinvasion phase; “Shock and Awe,” the slogan that should have condensed in two words the “spirit” of the first bombings; “Mission Accomplished,” the triumphant yet humble celebration of the victory with President Bush surrounded by happy and good-hearted marines. All of these instances, their images and their short but effective

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sentences aimed at rendering the Iraqi conflict—a war that was tremendously lacking in juridical, political, and strategic legitimation—spectacular, exciting, and above all media-friendly, or, to put it differently, entertainment-oriented. One might dare to say that Madison Avenue’s manipulative techniques have been replaced by those of Hollywood, insofar as it is to the cinematographic imagery that today’s propaganda refers, in order to entertain the public, which hardly has other parameters to refer to. Every mission is a Mission Impossible, every soldier a Private Ryan, every pilot a Top Gun, every enemy a dark-skinned, less-than human being with no face and no name. The relationship between politics and fiction seems to have reached a level Arendt could have not imagined, since she knew little or nothing of the powerful effects of spectacularized politics and violence. It is not by chance that such spectacularization has been initiated by the media-event par excellence, namely the Twin Towers terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, a decisive threshold between an obsolete Realpolitik and a new, unreal Fiktionpolitik. A politics based on the systematic abuse of fictions, which opens the way to the ecstatic fulfillment of the “clash of civilization” prophecy. The fact that such prophecy is based upon a fiction that is as vague (and vast) as it is appealing makes it readily disposable for ideological ends; but thanks to the spectacularized means of both terrorist and “legitimate” violence makes it also plausible. The ideological fiction—the clash of civilizations—becomes real by virtue of the violence that performs it, making it happen. The Vulnerable Reality of Politics There is, and this is the Arendtian lesson we could still learn, a dangerous affinity between opposed views of the world that reduce reality to a discountable datum, manipulable, and, as such, superfluous. It is by virtue of this supposed superfluity that systematic lying, fictional constructions that presuppose a reality that is in itself coherent and therefore similar to a theoretical model, can be implemented, and concretely realized. No ethical or moral considerations—even less utilitarian ones—can win the confrontation with a logical construction that systematically negates any factual truth. It was in fact Arendt who constantly accused the Western political tradition of founding itself, since its beginning, on a clamorous fictive entity, namely that of man in the singular. She points out how, from Aristotle up to modernity, political models have always been constructed upon an ontology centered on fictitious entities: man, the individual, the subject. As Adriana Cavarero notes, “Man, the Aristotelian anthropos, inaugurates a tradition in which the plurality of unique beings appears from the very beginning as an

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insignificant and superfluous given” (2005, 191). The famous zoon politikon, as Arendt claims, is founded on a clamorous falsification of the plural and antihierarchical matrix of politics. In fact, the given that “Man” stands for and therefore neutralizes the plurality of human beings, necessarily implies that he cannot be political since, in this horizon, there is no plurality and thus no relation. In the economy of the One—a mirror image of the economy of the Same—there is no in between, no common space to share. Thus, “what the Western tradition calls politics is in reality a model of de-politicization that excludes the plural and relational foundation of politics” (Cavarero 2005, 191). Arendt tried, during her lifetime, to go beyond this fictitious entity of man in the singular, attempting a phenomenology of the human, which is rooted in a plural context. Plurality, she affirms, is “the law of the earth.” Such a condition of plurality has to do with the fact that we all come to life as unique beings and have the possibility to realize such uniqueness only in the political sphere. She attempts, in other words, to abandon the political fictive entity of man, the individual, the subject—whose tradition, she claims, is not immune from ambiguous involvement in totalitarian regimes—and come closer, so to speak, to a concrete condition in which humans do come to life as distinct from one another, unrepeatable, irreplaceable, unique. But for this uniqueness to be recognized, each human being needs, in order to exist, the presence of others. Plurality therefore is the name given to irreducible differences that qualify each human being, who is at the same time undeniably related to others. Politics is the relational sphere in which such plurality can become manifest. Recently, there has been an interesting, albeit not openly Arendtian, reformulation of these themes carried out by Judith Butler, who, in her recent book Precarious Life (Butler 2004), has reflected upon the political impact of mourning and loss in the United States after September 11. In her book, she affirms that the shock of the terrorist attack should have been an occasion for the United States to reflect not only upon the effects of their foreign policy, but also upon the loss of their “First World privilege,” namely the privilege of perceiving themselves as secure, safe, prosperous, and in charge of their own destiny: To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be

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minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value. (Butler 2004, xii–xiii)

Acknowledging the unavoidable precariousness of life that we all experience (a precariousness that affects everyone today, not only Third World citizens) is what has become most necessary, and such precariousness is what forces us to recognize the interdependence that shapes our lives as humans. This constitutive dependence upon others—or the relationality of which also Adriana Cavarero speaks—can be seen as a positive occasion to reflect on the evanescence of the political “fictions” of man in the singular. Butler, in this respect, has fiercely criticized the way in which the United States has tried to misapprehend their exposure and vulnerability after September 11 by restoring their masculinity and their expanding sovereignty. What has been lacking, she says, is a way of recognizing vulnerability and thereby taking violence differently, making it an undeniable part of our human condition of dependence and precariousness. The shift, in this respect, has to do with a displacement of politics away from the immune individual—a fictitious entity that, as such has nowadays been swept away by the virtually nonexistent state—in order to relocate it in the vulnerable—and therefore exposed to others—self. Politics and ethics must be thought of within the context of an undeniable violence that, at the same time, is the cipher of an undeniable relationality. To sum up, politics in the age of globalization, the clash of civilizations, instead of producing spectacularized and violent fictions of the human condition, should humbly attempt to start anew from the undeniable fact that we come to the world in relation to other beings, and that such relationality does not simply mean to recognize that we are all doomed by total destruction. To take relationality seriously means to recognize our mutual dependence, now that the “protective” forms of modern politics are withering away, together with state sovereignty. To recognize such dependence does not entail a simple ethics of good will. It means to deconstruct any attempt at constructing a fictional narrative with a clear-cut distinction between good guys and bad guys. It means to recognize that relationality has to do with the undeniable acceptance of an unpleasant reality for which there can be no substitute. This is why Judith Butler theoretically shapes this relationality in the

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form of vulnerability: relationality means to depend upon others also in the form of being violently exposed to them. Each human being is exposed to the violence of a relationship. Needless to say, politics, in the age of globalization, has to come to terms with this vulnerability by interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation, trying to found the community on the common condition of loss, injury, and mourning. The fictions that have justified the war in Iraq, just as the fictions that continue to produce “martyrs,” neglect, obliterate, and disguise the human condition of plurality and relationality, and the implicit vulnerability this entails. It goes without saying that the level of fakeness we have reached has come to endanger even our own survival—which, to some extent, will more and more depend on the way in which we will deal with this undeniable vulnerability. References Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1972. Crises of the republic. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich. ———. 1972. Lying in politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers. Revised and extended version in Crises of the republic, by Hannah Arendt, 3–47. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich. ———. 1968. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York: Viking. ———. 1951/1966. The origins of totalitarianism. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith, and Adriana Cavarero. 2005. Condizione umana contro “natura.” Micromega 9: 25–35. Dean, Jodi. 2005. Evil’s political habitat. Redescriptions 9: 51–79. Disch, Lisa Jane. 1994. Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Guaraldo, Olivia. 2001. Storylines. Politics, history and narrative from an Arendtian perspective. Jyväskylä: SoPhi Academic Books. ———. n.d. Disobedient state and faithful citizen: Re-locating politics in the age of globalization. In The Ashgate research companion to democratisation in Europe (Politics, concepts and histories), ed. K. Palonen, T. Pulkkinen, and J. M. Rosales. London: Ashgate. Klein, Naomi. 2004. The year of the fake. Nation, January 26, http://www.thenation .com/doc/20040126/klein. Mann, Bonnie. 2006. How America justifies its war: A modern/postmodern aesthetics of masculinity and sovereignty. Hypathia 21 (4): 147–63.

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Mueller, John. 2005. The Iraqi syndrome. Foreign Affairs (November/December): 44–54. Salter, Lee. 2005. Problems of politics, media and truth: The BBC’s representation of the invasion of Iraq. Paper presented at the symposium Truth, Representation, Politics, May 25–27, University of Verona, Italy.

Notes 1. For a compelling analysis of the “war on terror” as characterized by a “masculine postmodern aesthetics,” see the article by Bonnie Mann, “How America Justifies its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and Sovereignty” (2006). 2. In an article, “The Year of the Fake,” which appeared in the Nation on January 26, 2004, Naomi Klein highlights how the phobia for facts has reached an almost comical level of absurdity. According to an FBI alert, reports Klein, police patrols—while carrying out routine investigations on drivers pulled over for traffic violations—were asked to keep their eyes open for people carrying almanacs around with them. Klein writes, “Why almanacs? Because they are filled with facts . . . [a]nd according to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin, facts are dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists, which can use them to ‘assist with target selection and preoperational planning’” (2004). Klein concedes that “the blacklisting of almanacs was a fitting end for 2003, a year that waged open war on truth and facts and celebrated forgeries of all kinds. This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey.” What we are dealing with is no longer a political use of lying, nor the imaginative use of fiction in order to change reality, but a systematic abuse of fiction, which becomes, eventually, a farce, and it is not by chance that Klein uses the word “fake.” Klein concludes, “I’m no longer convinced that America can be set free by truth alone. In many cases, fake versions of events have prevailed even when the truth was readily available. . . . Bush is actively remaking America in the image of his own ignorance and duplicity. Not only is it OK to be misinformed, but as the almanac warning shows, knowing stuff is fast becoming a crime” (2004). 3. See, for a detailed analysis of public understanding of the invasion of Iraq, Lee Salter, who, in a paper on the BBC representation of the war, reports some interesting data. He writes that tenuous—and unlikely—links between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda asserted by the U.S. government must have contributed to some “70% of Americans believing, against ‘factual truth’, that the Iraqi government had something to do with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 (Washington Post, 6 September 2003: p. A01). Even by 2005 47% of Americans believed that former President Hussein ‘helped plan and support the hijackers’ [Harris Poll #14, 18 February 2005], which was largely inferred in President Bush’s speeches [Christian Science

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Monitor, 14 March 2003].” I would like to thank Lee Salter for having provided me with the unpublished manuscript of this article. 4. On the political use of the term “evil” in presidential discourses from F. D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, and its progressively moral and religious connections, as well as vagueness, see the article “Evil’s Political Habitat,” by Jodi Dean (2005, especially 69–75). 5. For a relatively critical assessment on the relationship between war and public opinion in the United States during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, see John Mueller (2005).

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CHAPTER 12

Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art Lauri Siisiäinen

Introduction

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his chapter focuses on Michel Foucault’s late studies (in the early eighties, until his death), on issues of the art of living (tekhn¯e tou biou, un art de vivre) and aesthetics of existence (l’esthétique de l’existence). I intend to show how, in these studies, the issues of terror and fear—as well as their “opposite pole,” courage and audacity—occupy a central political significance for Foucault. My aim here is not to evaluate the accuracy of Foucault’s reading of the corpus of late ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, above all Stoic, Cynic and Epicurean.1 My aim here is, rather, to show firstly how Foucault, using the corpus of late ancient philosophy, presents an interesting conception on the significance of terror and fear as the adversary (if not the most central adversary) of the ethics and aesthetics of existence, and thus as central targets of resistance and struggle. Fear and terror become, in this manner, an urgent political issue, a relevant one also in Foucault’s own contemporary situation. Secondly, I attempt to show that—surprisingly, perhaps, and contrary to the established picture of Foucault as a thinker not much interested in issues of “sensory difference”—he tackles, in this context, the question concerning the particular significance of sound, voice, sonority, audition, and auditory effects, that is, sonorous art. What is emphasized as well is the relation of these to logos (discourse, speech, linguistic signification, etc.), their position in relation to the ethics and aesthetics of existence and, finally, also their relation to fear and terror.

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Terror, the Adversary of Art and Aesthetics It is quite clear that Foucault considers the overcoming and prevention of terror or fear to be of utmost importance in the art of living, in the care of the self (le souci de soi). Actually, it is a central (if not the most central) aim and task of “philosophizing,” that is, of the practicing of philosophical discourse and philosophical thinking as constituting an art of living. Philosophical “knowing” is supposed to help us overcome fear and terror, and to protect us (or our soul) from these states. Foucault writes, “It is a matter, says Demetrius, of knowing that a human being has very little to fear in other human beings, that he has nothing to fear in Gods . . . that he knows that ‘death generates no anguish and terminates plenty’” (2001a, 226). Of course, the actual content of philosophical knowledge and truth can vary substantially. Whether it concerns human beings, nature (as phusiologia does), or gods, what is expected from this truth and knowledge is precisely protection against fear and terror, in other words, courage in face of all the possible dangers, hardships, sufferings, loss, and even (and especially) death, whether they are of human or nonhuman origin. Why then is the extermination, the “cure” from fear and terror, such an important task, and what is the actual significance of truth and knowledge in this task? First, let me briefly summarize what I consider to be the central points in Foucault’s conception of the aesthetics of existence and art of living, ones that provide the reasons for his taking fear and terror as such serious adversaries. As we know, what particularly interests Foucault in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy is the significance of practicing philosophy (of the philosophical way of life) as an art of living (tekhn¯e tou biou, un art de vivre), in other words, as a set of arts, techniques, equipments, and exercises having life or existence, as such, as its “object.” Moreover, life or existence is taken as an “object” to be formed, shaped, and modified (not primarily as an object to be theoretically contemplated). More specifically, this means that for Foucault, the primary task of philosophy is to give a form (forma, une forme) to life or existence. Philosophy in this sense is more than anything else an art of creating and shaping a manner; a way of existing, a style of life, or a form of life. In other words, the task is to make one’s life into a work (une œuvre) that is beautiful and good (belle et bonne) (there is apparently no significant difference here between “good” and “beautiful”), to make oneself into an art object (l’objet d’art) or a work of art. This is the kernel of Foucault’s idea of the unity of ethics—as self-relation, self-government, care of the self—and the aesthetics of existence (l’esthétique de l’existence; 2001a, 405–6; 2001b, 1221–22, 1430, 1443).

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Furthermore, Foucault emphasizes that the liberty of artistic creation— “the liberty and choice (la liberté et le choix) of the one who uses his tekhn¯e” or “this liberty of the subject” (cette liberté du sujet)—is nothing less than a necessary condition for the aesthetical-ethical creation of self. Secondly, the aesthetic-ethical liberty of self-creation and self-government is given quite a specific and, one might add, a rather demanding sense. Foucault equates the liberty with self-sufficiency, or autarchy (autarkeis), with radical independence or autonomy in the self-creation/self-government, both of the choices and decisions, and of the actual practice/activity of creation (2001a, 230; 2001b, 1442).2 The liberty (la liberté) in this sense is, for Foucault, the ontological condition of ethics and aesthetics, whereas ethics and aesthetics are the reflective form taken by this liberty. Perhaps there is no need to even stress that the liberty Foucault is talking about, the autonomy and self-sufficiency of self-creation and self-government, is liberty without any determinate content (it is indeterminate liberty). It does not mean the actualization of (or reconciliation with) some pregiven law, essence, nature, identity, foundation, or origin of the human being (universally or particularly). Liberty, as autonomy of artistic creation and invention of the self, must be taken in a rather literal sense, as autonomy from any such pregiven “facts.” And in the reflective use of this liberty, in the care of the self, what in the end seems to be of the highest value is precisely the protection, perfection, and practicing of this indeterminate, artistic liberty. The care of the self, so it seems, becomes somewhat equal to the care of liberty (le souci de la liberté) (not the “self ” as person, self-identity, etc.) (Foucault 2001b, 1531–33; see Deleuze 1995, 92–118). The circularity in Foucault’s argumentation is quite explicit and self-conscious. Inimical to this liberty and, consequently, to the possibility of the aesthetics of existence and ethics as such, are all the various states of passivity and dependence, or different modalities of “being acted upon,” of being affected, moved, influenced, “permeated,” overpowered, and governed by a power, action, or event of some kind. Here, Foucault’s primary target is not the effect or impact on the body as such, but rather the threat to the (active/creative, ethical, and aesthetical) liberty of the subject. If an event of some kind is allowed to permeate and overpower the subject, to influence and govern the choices, decisions, and actions, the result is a state of passivity and dependency where the liberty, the central condition of ethics and aesthetics, is annihilated. It is important to notice that Foucault considers not only negative influences (prevention, constraint, limitation, and so on), but also “positive” modes of influence (such as stimulation, enticement, attraction, excitement, solicitation) as leading to passivity and, hence, as inimical to liberty.

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Consequently, the art of living and care of the self—in order to protect the liberty—imply, or better yet, become inseparable from a continuous and irreconcilable struggle (une lutte) of the subject against becoming intruded, permeated, and overpowered by various actions or events, whether in positive or negative manner (Foucault 2001a, 230, 306–8, 405). To protect our liberty, we need to perform specific sorts of activities, with their own arts, techniques, and equipment. Foucault believes that we need philosophical discourse or logos, precisely as such equipment of protection and preparation (paraskeu¯e). What this discursive protection/preparation does is nothing less than make us sufficiently armed, in order to win the constant struggle against the threats to liberty, to make possible our successful resistance against our being influenced, affected, and overpowered (Foucault 2001, 230). With this agonistic character of philosophical discourse (and philosophical art of living as such) in mind, Foucault can call the person engaged in this discourse the athlete of the ancient spirituality, one who is constantly engaged in “a struggle (une lutte), struggle in which his adversary is all that may emerge from the exterior world: the event (l’événement). The ancient athlete is an athlete of the event” (Foucault 2001a, 306–8; emphasis added). In this struggle, so it seems, there is no other sort of equipment that can really help us (at least not one mentioned by Foucault), except logos, that is, the practice of philosophical discourse. Without this discursive equipment at one’s disposal, the human being remains vulnerable, unprotected, and unprepared in the face of the affective, intrusive, and overpowering tendency of events. It is now that we explicitly come back to the issue of terror and fear. Namely, Foucault mentions the events of hardship, suffering, lack and loss (together with their counterpart, pleasure and gratification), as forming the most serious threat—as well as the “test”—to ethical-aesthetical liberty. As a result, the preparation for these kinds of events, for our confrontation with them, needs special attention and effort. The discursive equipment mentioned are, perhaps more than anything else, needed to protect our liberty, our basic ethical-aesthetical self-mastery, from becoming affected, intruded, permeated, troubled, overwhelmed, and overpowered by hardships and sufferings: This human being does not have at his disposal the discourse-aid (le discourssecours), the discourse-recourse (le discours-recours), which would allow him to react as he must, not to let himself be troubled, to remain master of himself. And, in default of this equipment, he is going to be in a way amenable to the event (perméable à l’événement). This event is going to enter into his soul (va entrer dans son âme), troubling it (la troubler), affecting it (l’affecter), etc. Hence, he will find himself in a state of passivity (en état de passivité) in

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respect to this event. So, one must prepare oneself for the events that arrive, one must prepare oneself for the hardships (se préparer aux maux). (Foucault 2001a, 450)

As it turns out, the actual threat to the freedom or liberty of the ethicalaesthetical activity is to be found in our confrontation with events of hardship, in accidents of various kinds, and in our reaction to these. To prevent our becoming seized and overwhelmed, it is necessary to prepare ourselves with discursive equipment. And, if we want to find names for these states of passivity and nonfreedom, in which the subject becomes intruded on by hardship, these are nothing other than fear and terror. In the last instance, the real and most serious adversaries of liberty, and of the possibilities of ethics and aesthetics, are fear and terror. In the last instance, the discursive equipment (logos, philosophical truth and knowledge) of preparation are indispensable because they offer us protection by overcoming and doing away with fear and terror. Foucault writes, “It would be the knowledge of nature, of phusis . . . also in so far as it is susceptible of transforming the subject (de transformer le sujet) (who was, in face of nature, in face of what one had been taught about the Gods and the things of the world, totally filled with fears and terrors [tout rempli de craintes et de terreurs]) into a free subject (en un sujet libre), a subject who will discover in himself the possibility and resource of his inalterable and perfectly tranquil pleasure” (Foucault 2001a, 231; emphasis added). Resistance, Terror, and Courage By now, I hope it has become clear that the issue of fear and terror—their adversity to the very fundamental conditions of the aesthetics of existence, as Foucault understands these in his late thought—is anything but irrelevant to Foucault. Moreover, we also already know the central, political consequence Foucault draws from the irreconcilable antagonism between the ethical-aesthetical liberty and fear/terror: the task of taking care of and protecting liberty becomes intrinsically related to, even inseparable from, the practice of resistance against fear and terror. Absence of fear and terror, of the inclination toward these—in other words courage, intrepidity, audacity, unruliness, or stubbornness—fostered by the appropriate discursive equipment and exercises, are states in which the subject becomes “impermeable” and “unyielding,” impossible to become seized and overwhelmed. In this manner, courage—the absence of fear and terror—is a state that protects our autarchy, our liberty of self-government and artistic self-creation, against various attempts to influence and govern us. Foucault writes, “Phusiologia gives the

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individual an audacity (une hardiesse), a courage, a sort of intrepidity allowing him to confront not only the multiple beliefs (les croyances multiples) that someone has wanted to impose on him, but equally the dangers of life and the authority of those who want to order him about. Absence of fear (absence de peur), audacity, a sort of stubbornness (sorte de rétivité), unruliness (fringance) if you will: that’s what phusiologia will give to the individuals who learn it. Secondly, these individuals will become autarkeis” (2001a, 230). As we learn from this quotation, courage (absence of terror), and the related discursive equipment, occupy a political significance: they allow us to resist authority and orders, different attempts to govern us. Furthermore, the significance of fighting against fear and terror is not limited (contrary to what one might be inclined to suppose at first) to resistance against violence, or against the modes of power operating through a threat of violence. The exercises and equipment of overcoming terror occupy a far more central, far more extensive significance for the practices of resistance, also for the ones targeted against forms of power or governance operating in positive or productive fashion, that is, by enticing, stimulating, soliciting, and so on. As the quotation already shows, courage allows us to resist and struggle (successfully) against what Foucault calls the imposition of beliefs. Although Foucault does not, on this occasion, specify what sort of activity—of influence, of rhetorical persuasion or the like—he means by this, it is evident that it is a relation of positive/productive power. It is evident as well that to be able to resist this, what is needed is (again) absence of fear and terror and, consequently, the appropriate discursive equipment. Besides, imposition of beliefs is a practice and technique that can well be (and of course historically speaking, has been) significant in the functioning of those productive/positive, both individualizing and totalizing forms of power, on which Foucault has focused some of his most influential genealogical analyses. I am referring, above all, to Foucault’s studies on subjection (l’assujettissement)—the power of fixing an individual to his/her “proper identity” (la propre identité)—and pastoral power (le pouvoir pastoral), the power operating through the obligations and stimulations to self-examination, self-consciousness, and “speaking the truth” about oneself (see 2001b, 953–80, 1046–51, 1614–18, 1624). To be sure, we should remember that it is not only sovereign power that operates by means of terror: also (and perhaps even most importantly in the modern context) normalization functions by invoking, maintaining, and (so it seems) by making us internalize an aptitude for terror and fear (I will return to this later). So, there is all the more reason to see the protection from fear and terror as a central task also in resistance against modern, disciplinary/normalizing modes of power. If this is the case, does it mean that the protection against

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fear and terror—and the related, indispensable discursive equipment of “counterknowledge” and “counter truth,” as one might call these—are, in the end, something similar to the general conditions of resistance and struggle as such, just as various and heterogeneous as the contexts, situations, targets, and agents of the struggles might be in other respects? Although Foucault does not articulate this conclusion, it seems rather difficult to avoid it, if we follow the line of argumentation presented earlier. It is certainly clear that Foucault’s interest in the ethics and aesthetics of the self, in the philosophical art of living, including their political sense, is rather far from a strictly contextualist approach to history (to history of philosophy, cultural history, history of ideas, or concepts). He never attempts to hide the fact either that his study’s disposition, its problematics, its choice of focus, among other things, might be conditioned by his own contemporary situation, above all by certain political issues he (personally) considers of utmost urgency. The reflection on the aesthetics and ethics of living, on the techniques of the self, and on the equipment to overcome terror, is such an urgent task “if it is true after all that there is no other point, the first and ultimate, of resistance against political power, except in the relation of self to itself ” (Foucault 2001a, 241; emphasis added). Because, according to Foucault’s diagnosis, in the contemporary situation, the struggle against the forms of subjection (les formes d’assujettissement) or against the submission of the subjectivity (la soumission de la subjectivité) is the most urgent one; thus it is understandable that the resistance is situated above all in relation of the self to itself. And, correspondingly, it is understandable as to why the (re)discovery and elaboration of practices, techniques, and equipment of the self in particular becomes such an urgent political task for Foucault (2001b, 1047–51). In this manner, in his analyses of the art of living, Foucault is able to approach the question of resistance in terms more specific than before to tackle the issue of the constitution of the resistant subject(s), or of the resistant subjectification, also at the level of its arts, techniques, and equipment. And, as I have tried to show, it is precisely the necessity of protection against fear and terror, as well as the exercises and equipment indispensable for this, which occupy a major significance in Foucault’s thought on the matter. Sonorous Art and the Terror of Sound Next, after having examined Foucault’s basic juxtaposition between fear/terror and aesthetics of existence, it is possible to turn to the second question of the chapter: what, then, is the particular role of the ear(s), sound, audition, and sonorous art or music in this constellation? In the second part of the chapter, it is this question that will occupy my attention. As I intend to show,

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Foucault does indeed tackle the question about auditory perception and sound in this context. This may appear surprising, though, as in general Foucault is not perhaps portrayed as a thinker who would really have been interested in this sort of thing. When it comes to reading Foucault’s late studies on the art of living, on aesthetics and the ethics of existence, the importance of discursive practices, techniques, and equipment has been duly noticed. However, the issue of different “materialities” of media, the body of discourse (so to speak), and the related different perceptual/sensory qualities (visual, auditory, etc.), and the distinctive arts and techniques of sensory effects, has not really been pondered in this context. Perhaps it has been assumed that what actually matters for Foucault in his discussion on the techniques, practices, and equipment of the self, is the meaning-content or “message” of discourse, taken as somewhat independent and abstracted from the sensory/perceptual specificities of media. Hence, the resistant subjectification, the politics of fostering courage and terminating terror, would be reducible to the level of linguistic signification, to meaning-generation, communication, interpretation, and so on (see, for instance, Nehamas 2000, 157–88). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the aesthetics (and ethics) of existence becomes (strangely) an aesthetics indifferent and neutral toward the question of perception, sensation, and to differences in the materials (if this is the case, is there any specifc reason to even speak of “aesthetics” anymore?).3 Yet, I would like to argue, in the second part of the chapter, that the case is not quite as simple as that. Foucault begins to reflect on the significance of sound when he is discussing the relation between the art of living and paideia (which is somewhat roughly the Greek word for education): This paideia, it is what one notices among people, who are, as the translation says, ‘verbal artists (des artistes du verbe)’. It is, to put it exactly: ph¯on¯es ergastikous. Ergastikoi, they are the artisans, the workers, that is to say, people who work not for themselves, but to sell and make profit. And what is the object, on which these ergastikoi work? It is ph¯on¯e, in other words, speech in so far as it makes noise (la parole en tant qu’elle fait du bruit), but not in so far as it is logos or the reason (mais non pas en tant quelle [sic!] est le logos ou la raison). They are, I would say, the ‘makers of words (les faiseurs de mots)’. They are the people who fabricate, to sell these, a certain number of effects that are bound to the sonority of words (d’effects qui sont liés à la sonorité des mots), instead of being people who work for themselves at the level of logos (au niveau du logos), which is to say, of the rational frame of the discourse (de l’armature rationnelle du discours). So, one has paideia, defined . . . as that which is the object itself of these artisans of the verbal noise (de ces artisans du bruit verbal). (Foucault 2001a, 229; emphasis added)

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We might notice here the way in which Foucault constructs a juxtaposition in this passage. On one side, there is the art of living, the care of the self, and the ethical/aesthetical liberty, together with their indispensable discursive equipment (logos) of preparation and protection, of fighting against terror and fostering courage. In the first part of the chapter, the meaning of these has already been examined in some detail. On the other side of the juxtaposition, there is the constellation formed by paideia, together with the art as well as the artists or artisans of verbal noise, that is, the art and artists of the sonority of voice, and of the sonorous and auditory effects, as separate from semantics, from linguistic signification and the meaning-content of discourse. Between these two poles, there seems to be a relation of conflict. Now, let me focus on the latter side of the juxtaposition and try to clarify what actually is at stake in the antagonism between the two. First, as Foucault points out, there is the intertwinement of paideia and sound, sonorous/auditory effects, and the art of these. In this manner, by equating the sonority with noise—as forming the specific object of the artisans’ skill, and (apparently) also the instrument or equipment of the dubitable sort of education— Foucault highlights the juxtaposition between the two poles. On one side, we have the sonorous/auditory event of voice or sound as such, without signification, with all the sonorous/auditory qualities (such as timbre, tone, melisma, rhythm, volume, and so on) in all their independent richness and variety. On the other side, we have logos or meaningful discourse, and the voice that has been submitted to and conditioned by the demands of linguistic signification. Foucault seems to think that the sonorous art, or the art of noise, is the art of mastering sound or voice precisely in all the rich variety of its sonorous qualities and, consequently, mastering the rich variety of auditory effects on the listener, without being satisfied (or interested) in just fulfilling the basic needs of linguisitic signification (clarity in the articulation of understandable speech, etc.). Hence, we can understand what Foucault means by equating the art of sonority with the art of nonmeaning (or, at least, with linguistic nonmeaning), namely, with the art of noise. Foucault does not further specify what he means by the sonority of voice or sound, or what sort of sonorous qualities he actually believes to form the definite object of mastery of the artists/artisans of noise. Perhaps we could just take sonority here in a rather common sense of the term, including qualities such as volume, timbre, pitch, inflection, melody, rhythm, resonance, attack, and so on. In this sense, what Foucault calls the art of sonority approximates music, and vocal music in particular. Similarly, he does not specify the quality of the auditory effects produced by this art and its artists. All we know is that sonority—its art and its

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effects—are separate from and irreducible to logos and, consequently, the philosophical art of living. How, then, should we understand the auditory/sonorous effects produced by the artists of noise, and what is the reason for establishing such a strong linkage between these effects and paideia, and juxtaposing these with the philosophical care of the self? Perhaps the best known and most seminal depiction of ancient Greek paideia, in which the significance of sound and music is highlighted, can be found in various dialogues of Plato. Curiously enough, however, when Foucault explicitly analyses the sense of paideia in the Platonic dialogues, he does not take up the question of music there (or the question of voice, sound, sonority, etc.), but instead concentrates, in more general terms, on the significance of the Socratic imperative (know yourself/connais-toi toi-même/gn¯othi seauton). Only, when it comes to the Pythagorean tradition, does Foucault briefly mention the fact that music actually had importance there as a technique of purification (2001a, 43–76). On the other hand, as we already saw, when Foucault does explicitly discuss (in a negative tone) sonorous paideia (the art of noise, etc.), juxtaposing this with the aesthetic-ethical art of living, he does not further explicate what his actual historical referent is. Yet, I see no reason to presume either that Foucault’s remarks on paideia examined earlier, in which the sonorous techniques are given such a central role, should exclude the reflections on this topic to be found in Plato’s dialogues. Indeed, I see no reason why we should not turn to the dialogues in order to further clarify the meaning of the sonorous/musical art in education, its techniques and effects (as well as the negative sense given it by Foucault), or what could be a textual source more appropriate for this task. Nonetheless, in this chapter, I cannot focus on the Platonic ideas of paideia in any more detail. Modern Elaborations of the Ancient Model: Sonorous Techniques of Fear and Terror When Foucault, in L’Herméneutique du sujet (2001a), explicitly discusses the significance of sonorous art in paideia, he does not specify what he means by the sonorous/auditory effect, and how these are related to the practices of education. However, this does not mean that Foucault would have been ignorant or uninterested in the more specific senses of paideia as the government of affects. On another, earlier occasion (a discussion in 1977), he points out the significance of Plato’s dialogues in their presentation of such rational technologies of power, which in a positive/productive (nonrepressive) manner take

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control over the irrational realm (of instincts, drives, desires, impulses, affects, etc.) (see Foucault 2001b, 396). We can easily see how Foucault’s depiction of these “Platonic” techniques or technologies of power (rational technologies of the irrational) relates to some of the most central points in Foucault’s genealogical analyses of modern forms of power. The significance of these sorts of technologies, if we want to situate them in the framework of Foucault’s thought, is anything but a curiosity of ancient political thought. The description of these technologies that stimulate, direct, organize, instrumentalize, and “functionalize” drives, desires, and instincts, that in turn produce aptitudes and dispositions, and by these means take care of the usefulness and productivity (as a resource) of the irrational, seems to fit well into Foucault’s well-known account of the basic mechanisms of the modern disciplinary apparatus. We can also find one quite concrete point of affinity between the Platonic account of mimetic paideia (the musical-imitative governing over affects) and Foucault’s conception of modern discipline. Discipline makes the individuals (their forces, their capacities, their energies) useful and productive especially by shaping and organizing their manner or aptitude of orientation in time, the manner in which their activity unfolds in the temporal axis. This is done by making them internalize (educating and teaching them) an obligatory rhythm, a model or pattern, which divides movements into punctual series of discrete, calculable units, assigns them a definite direction and prescribes their order of succession (see Foucault 1979, 143, 151–52, 170, 187, 195–97, 200–3, 216–17; 2001c, 1486–90). Also, in Foucault’s presentation, the technologies of the irrational—further developments of the ancient “prototype” of paideia—would appear to be particularly functional for the normalizing mode of modern power. As we know, Foucault’s idea is that normalization aims at the correction and regularization (making socially nondangerous) of the individual, not only (or even primarily) at the level of actual behavior, but more essentially already at the level of virtualities, that is, of possible behavior and capacities. Normalization aims at detecting and correcting—and thus defending the society against—the dangers to be found in the individual’s affects, impulses, instincts/desires, motives, aptitudes, attitudes, and habits. Special attention is focused on the direction and organization (or their lack) in the economy of the irrational, precognitive, prelinguistic, and involuntary processes, and on the “character” constituted by these. Hence, for normalization to be successful, the rational technologies of the irrational are of particular importance (see Foucault 1999, 23–24, 46, 84–86, 119–47; Foucault 2001c, 1461, 1471, 1474, 1482; Foucault 2001b, 452–64).

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And now, we finally come back again to the issue of terror and fear. As Foucault insists, both fear and terror have quite a significant role to play in normalization as well. The force of a norm (and of law made to function as a norm), the effectivity of guaranteeing compliance or conformism together with the concomitant difficulty of resistance or subversion rests (at least for a significant part) on the affects of terror and fear. Not, however, on the fear and terror of sovereign violence, on the fear of punishment or anything of the sort. Instead, the force of the norm rests on the fear, terror, and aversion related to and aroused by the abnormal and socially dangerous as such, that is, by the criminal, the pathological, the perverse, the subversive behavior, affect, desire or person/character (without leaving any need for an exterior threat of punishment or sanction). The technologies of the irrational— among which the sonorous art has already been given its significance—are precisely the ones used to provide the norm with this “motivating” force of internalized fear and terror, to relate perversity to danger, fear, and terror (Foucault 1999, 33; Foucault 2001b, 139). If paideia is understood as something like the prototype of the power over the irrational, it is not surprising that Foucault should construct the juxtaposition, in which we find, on one side, the ethics/aesthetics of existence with its protective discursive equipment (logos), and, on the other side, paideia, with its arts and techniques of the irrational, the art of noise and sonorous/auditory effects. As it has been emphasized, the equipment of true discourse is needed to protect us—our liberty of self-creation and self-government—from terror, and by these means to make us resistant to various attempts at governing us. In opposition to such discursive equipment, as we have noticed, paideia with its sonorous arts, techniques/technologies seems to have its role precisely in the affective government of the “soul”: “so, the function of phusiologia is to paraskeuein, to give the soul the equipment necessary for its combat (son combat), for its objective and for its victory. As such, it is opposed to paideia” (Foucault 2001a, 230). Interestingly, when it comes to fostering courage—the absence of terror that makes us resistant, unyielding, impermeable, and unruly—the sonorous arts and techniques (in rhetoric or music) do not seem to have anything positive to offer. They can only stimulate, direct, organize, and shape our aptitude for pleasure and suffering, and the related aptitudes for fear and terror, thus in the end only maintaining or enhancing our submission to these passive affects. And, as it turns out, it is precisely with paideia, not with the discursive protection of aesthetic liberty, that Foucault so strongly relates the art of sonority, the art of noise, and the production of sonorous/auditory effects. Sonority is not given any positive function when it comes to taking care of

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and protecting our liberty, to overcoming fear and terror, and to embracing the arts of resistant subjectification. It appears as if music were, in somewhat essential terms, depicted as the art that can only serve apparatuses of power, not practices of resistance and freedom (a conclusion not exactly coherent with Foucault’s basic ideas of genealogy; see, e.g., Foucault 2001c, 1004–24). To this, I would like to add that the affinities between paideia and modern discipline/normalization can be found not only at the general level of objects, goals, and strategies (in the control of the irrational, etc.). Moreover, we could speak of modern elaboration/variation of the ancient model of paideia (more or less explicitly, of course) also when it comes to the specific technologies of power being used in this “positive” control of desires/ instincts. I am speaking of the use of music and sonorous techniques more generally in modern discipline and normalization (albeit Foucault himself does not really argue this point explicitly). There are various historical examples of the significance of musical/sonorous techniques of affective control, even surpassing the significance of linguistic and visual techniques, in different phases of development of modern forms of power. And, to be sure, the examples I refer to here could be considered as being quite central also in the light of Foucault’s genealogical studies. First, I could point out various (rather well-known) examples of the importance of music in the history of the Renaissance and the modern art of war and military discipline, with the strong homage paid to the ancient models (see for instance the discussion of Machiavelli 1989, 621). Moreover, one could take the French Revolution and the explicit attempt of the Jacobin government to return to the Greek and Roman models on the use of certain musical modes, rhythms, and instruments in order to generate and maintain a passionately patriotic, militant, self-sacrificial, and law-respecting citizenry of the new Republic (see Johnson 1995, 116–53). Or, going ahead still further in history, I could point out how in the modern psychological/psychiatric discourse and practice (in Foucault’s terms psy-function, la fonction psy), music, and in particular rhythm and volume, has been given significance as a mimetic instrument for controlling the normality and abnormality of individuals, as defined in terms of the order of durations, dynamics, and intensities of both bodily and mental processes (see, e.g., Condon 1986, 55–57, 58–75; Evans 1986, 266–73; Rider and Eagle 1986, 229–42). The ancient musical paideia is, perhaps, not so remote and alien to us after all. As we know, in his analyses of discipline and normalization Foucault’s explicit focus is, in general, rather exclusively on the visual/optical (pan-optical) or discursive techniques, which makes him vulnerable to accusations of certain visual bias, and of ignorance concerning the potentials and actual

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historical significance of other sorts of techniques of power.4 However, as we have seen, when it comes to paideia, Foucault does acknowledge the central significance of the art of sound, sonority and sonorous/auditory effects, although, admittedly his explicit discussion on this point remains rather scarce and limited to the historical context of ancient Greco-Roman culture. Conclusion: Philosophers and the Terror of Sound In this manner, Foucault actually does acknowledge the possibility, as well as the actual historical role, of sonorous (and also musical) power. On this basis, I consider the charge of Foucault’s ignorance of the political potential and significance of sonority (and music) to be, to say the least, too harsh and categorical. For its part, this fact also requires us to revise the established portrait of Foucault as a thinker with an exclusively visual or linguistic focus, as one who denies or ignores the political potentiality of the use of sound, sonority, auditory perception, and music, together with the historical significance of these. Thus, the possibilities opened for sonorous genealogies, for political genealogies of music, are only waiting to be actualized. As we have seen, Foucault’s approach to the sphere of sonority and audition appears to have a rather strong negative quality to it. The art, technology, and equipment of sound and voice, music, and auditory effects (and also rhetoric, in so far it deals precisely with auditory effects) seem to be suitable only to subjecting us to pleasure, suffering, and, most importantly, to fear and terror. In this chapter, it has been my intention to show that, for Foucault, fear and terror are perhaps the most serious adversaries of the ethical/aesthetical liberty of the creation of self as a work of art. Consequently, protection from terror is also an urgent (if not the most central) task, if we intend to take care of this liberty. Apparently, the sonorous/auditory technologies cannot help us in “taking care of ourselves.” In Foucault’s opinion, the latter task appears to be reserved exclusively to the discursive equipment, to logos. Does this indeed mean that sonority and audition are defined by a list of “functions” (also political functions), which themselves are not understood as politically constituted, contestable, and historically changeable (contingent), but instead as something like prepolitically given, inherent, and invariable? I’m referring to the presupposition of the inherent passivity of audition and the “ear,” and of the overwhelming, penetrating, and affective “natural power” of sound and music? This presupposition has certainly been a popular one throughout the history of Occidental philosophy, variations of it ranging from Plato to divergent modern philosophers, such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Bergson, all the

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way to Phenomenology and even to thinkers labeled poststructuralist. It is, so it seems, the adoption of this idea that has also led, as one might say, to the common reaction of fear and terror by the philosophical tradition in respect to audition, sound, and music, to fear and terror about the threat posed by music to subjectivity, liberty, and self-mastery (of course, those hoping for the liberation from the rational/autonomous subject have celebrated music for the very same reasons). Is it not strange that Foucault should, in the end (contrary to his own basic orientation), uncritically succumb to this idea of a fundamental (ontological, one could say) threat, fear and terror of music, without any attempt to politicize it, or to even reflect on the possibilities of different and conflicting political uses of music, sound, sonority and so on? Actually, I believe that this is not all Foucault had to say on the issue, but to this question I must return on another occasion. References Bal, Mieke. 1993. His master’s eye. In Modernity and the hegemony of vision, ed. David Michael Levin, 379–405. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Jane. 1996. How is it, then, that we still remain barbarians? Foucault, Schiller, and the aestheticization of ethics. Political Theory 24 (4): 653–72. Condon, William S. 1986. Communication: Rhythm and structure. In Rhythm in psychological, linguistic and musical processes, ed. James R. Evans and Manfred Clynes, 55–79. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Evans, James R. 1986. Dysrhythmia and disorders of learning and behavior. In Rhythm in psychological, linguistic and musical processes, ed. James R. Evans and Manfred Clynes, 249–75. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Flynn, Thomas R. 1993. Foucault and the eclipse of vision. In Modernity and the hegemony of vision, ed. David Michael Levin, 273–86. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Le pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au Collège de France. 1973–1974. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. ———. 2001a. L’Herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France. 1981–1982. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. ———. 2001b. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Paris: éditions Gallimard. ———. 2001c. Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Paris: éditions Gallimard. ———. 1999. Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de France. 1974–1975. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. ———. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.

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Hadot, Pierre. 1992. Reflections on the notion of the “cultivation of the Self.” In Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. and ed. Timothy J. Armstrong, 225–31. New York: Routledge. Howes, David. 2005. Historicizing perception. In Empire of the sense. The sensual culture reader, ed. David Howes, 55–59. Oxford and New York: Berg. Jay, Martin. 1996. Vision in context: Reflections and refractions. In Vision in context: Historical and contemporary perspectives on sight, ed. Martin Jay and Teresa Brennan, 1–15. New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. Downcast eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. In the empire of the gaze: Foucault and the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. In Foucault: A critical reader, ed. David Hoy, 175–205. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1988. The rise of hermeneutics and the crisis of ocularcentrism. Poetics Today 9 (2): 307–26. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A cultural history. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Law, Lisa. 2005. Home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong. In Empire of the sense: The sensual culture reader, ed. David Howes, 224–45. Oxford and New York: Berg. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1989. The chief works and others. Vol 2. Trans. Alan Gilbert. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 2000. The art of living: Socratic reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. Nachgelassene Fragmente. Frühjahr bis Herbst 1884. KGW, 7. Abteilung, 2. Band. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1969. Ecce Homo. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW), 6. Abteilung, 3. Band. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1950. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Werke in drei Bänden. Band 2. Ed. Karl Schlechta. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Rider, Mark S., and Charles T. Eagle, Jr. 1986. Rhythmic entrainment as a mechanism for learning in music therapy. In Rhythm in psychological, linguistic and musical processes, ed. James R. Evans and Manfred Clynes, 225–49. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Schafer, R. Murray. 2003. Open ears. In The auditory culture reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 25–41. New York: Berg. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2003. Hearing loss. In The auditory culture reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 41–61. New York: Berg. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Notes 1. For the criticism of Foucault’s interpretation targeted, among other things, on his tendency to aestheticize, I recommend a review chapter by Pierre Hadot (1992). 2. Foucault’s elaboration of this conception of aesthetic-ethical liberty—in particular its relation to Nietzsche—in his late thought has been discussed quite a lot (see Foucault 2001b, 1211–12, 1436–37; see also Nehamas 2000, 157–88). To point out certain differences between Nietzsche and Foucault on these issues (and to problematize Foucault’s self-proclaimed “Nietzscheanism”) see, for instance, Nietzsche 1950, §296; Nietzsche 1974, 25/385; Nietzsche 1969 (Ecce Homo, Warum ich so gute Bücher Schreibe), §4. 3. Of course, one (prejudiced) reason for regarding these issues as being unimportant for Foucault might be the fact that they have been so closely related to Phenomenology. Interestingly, Bennett (1996) speculates on whether Foucault’s techniques of the self might have a special proximity with the “hand” and the sense of touch, but the grounds for this conclusion remain somewhat obscure. 4. For examples of the strong visual emphasis in Foucault’s genealogies of modern power (see, e.g., Foucault 1979, 187, 200; Foucault 2001c, 718, 741; Foucault 2001b,190, 197–98, 373–74; Foucault 2003, 71, 75–79, 103–4, 248, 300–301; Foucault 1999, 41–44). For the various critical arguments accusing Foucault either of a reductive/essentialist account of vision, or of his neglect of the role of audition and other senses (see Howes 2005; Law 2005; Sterne 2003, 14–19, 127–28; Schmidt 2003; Schafer 2003; Jay 1988, 307–26; Jay 1989, 175–205; Jay 1994, 6–7, 1–26, 381–416, 587–95; Jay 1996, 1–15; Flynn 1993, 273–86; Bal 1993, 379–405).

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Index

9/11, 1–5, 8–9, 12, 65, 74, 97. See also September 11, 2001 abstract political art, 41–44, 46, 49, 76 Abu Ghraib, 50 Abu Ghraib 80, 37 Abu Ghraib 81, 37 acting out, 3, 139–40 working through, 1, 13, 17, 112, 139 advertisements, 178–79 aesthetics, 13, 17, 19, 42–43, 48, 52, 62–63, 65, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 77, 222, 227–29, 231, 233, 234 aesthetics and politics, 42, 63 aesthetics of existence, 227–29, 231, 233, 238 Afghanistan, 4–5, 8, 32, 62 Africa, 130, 137–38 Aftermath, 63 Agamben, Giorgio, 14, 72, 99, 105–9 on biopolitics, 108 on Levi’s paradox, 105–8 on the state of exception, 106–7 agitation, 166, 168, 175–76 Alexander II, 88 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 13, 42, 57 All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 10 Al Qaeda, 1, 32, 83–84, 222 amateur artists, 169 America, 5, 8–9, 16, 213, 217, 222 American Civil War, 26, 29 Andries, Alexandru, 159 And there’s nothing to be done, 36

And this, too, 40 animals, treatment of, 133 Anthelme, Robert, 118 Apel, Dora, 33 architecture, 5, 148, 155–56 Arendt, Hannah, 17–18, 97, 99, 106–7, 109–10, 207–14, 216–19 on modern political lie, 109–10 Aristotle, 141, 204, 210, 218 Art and Fear, 42 art and politics, 16, 57, 71, 75, 147–48, 169 art of living, 227–28, 230, 233–36 audiovisual television and radio, 159 audition, 227, 233, 240–41, 243 Aura, 11, 13, 61–65, 67–75, 77, 79 Auschwitz, 14–15, 99, 106, 108, 110, 112–13, 117, 119–20, 124 Auster, Paul, 6 author, 1, 5, 7, 10, 15, 32–33, 84, 89–91, 93–94, 99, 101, 113, 117, 119, 125–27, 129–32, 138–43, 157, 163, 189 author-as-character, 130 authoritarian, 16–17, 149–50 autobiography, 113, 119–20, 122, 125–26 Babel, 2 Bakunin, Michael, 42, 86–88, 90–91, 94 Bal, Mieke, 131 Bar Hama, Avner, 50

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Index

Barthes, Roland, 13, 19, 61, 67, 99 Bashir, Mohammed, 32 Battle of Chile, The, 158 Baudrillard, Jean, 62, 64–65, 67 Bellos, David, 123, 125–26 Bely, Andrei, 16, 22 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 13, 28, 57, 61–72, 74–75, 79 Berest, Dganit, 52–53, 57–58 Bergson, Henri, 240 Berlin, Isaiah, 204 Berman, Marshall, 10, 16, 19 Biao, Lin, 170 Bin Laden, Osama, 74, 84 Black Painting, 179–80 Blanchot, Maurice, 72 Bleiker, Roland, 34 Blood Test No. 5, 54 Bolsheviks, 88 Botero, Fernando, 12–13, 25, 34–37, 40 Bredekamp, Horst, 34 Brockmeier, Jens, 2, 9 Bronze Horseman, The, 9 Brothers Karamazov, The, 93 Bullfight, 30 Burke, Edmund, 199 Buruma, Ian, 92 Bush government, 1 Bush, George W., 217, 222–23 Bus Line 32a, 48 Butler, Judith, 18, 219–20 Callot, Jacques, 39 Calm Reigns in All the Country, The, 158 Camera Lucida, 13, 61 campaigns, 169–70, 172 Capa, Robert, 29 Carroll, Noël, 203 Caruth, Cathy, 123 Cavarero, Adriana, 18, 218, 220 Ceau¸sescu, Nicolae, 12, 149–57, 159–60, 163 Celan, Paul, 115–16, 128

censorship, 148, 157–58 Chambre claire, La, 61 Chaplin, Charlie, 123 character functions, 130 Chen, Xiaomei, 175, 178 Chic Point, 46 children, 3, 50, 62, 84, 90, 119, 121, 132, 136–37, 139, 142, 172, 175–78, 185–88, 192, 195–96, 199 Chile, 12, 16, 147, 149, 151–59, 163, 213 China, 11, 151, 166–67, 169, 181, 208, 213 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 17, 165–69, 179, 181 Chomsky, Noam, 84 Cicero, 204 cinema, 58, 68, 75, 148, 155, 157–58 Cioroianu, Adrian, 156, 163 Clemenceau, Benjamin Georges, 210 Coetzee, J. M., 9, 15, 129–30, 138, 142–43 Cohn, Dorrit, 125 Collier, Simon, 149 Communism, 150, 160, 208, 213 Communist Manifesto, The, 10 community, 12–13, 16–18, 41–42, 72–73, 109, 132, 185–86, 188–92, 194–200, 202, 220–21 saving the community-saving the soul relation, 185, 189, 196–99, 202 Condottiere, La, 120 Confucius, 167 Conrad, Joseph, 211 content/form, 48 Cotter, Holland, 34–35 courage, 10–11, 78, 227–28, 231–32, 234–35, 238 Crime and Punishment, 93 Crimean War, 29–30 Crime fiction, 7 critique, 5, 17, 28, 30–31, 65–68, 72, 74, 77, 79, 94, 211 Critique of Judgment, 211

Index cruelty, 29, 35, 133, 135–36, 143–44, 168 cult of the leader, 160 cultural policies, 147, 153 Cultural Revolution, 11, 16–17, 165–67, 170, 172–73, 175, 179–81 cultural trauma, 13, 41–42, 46, 51, 57 Dadaism, 3, 70 Danner, Mark, 40 Danto, Arthur, 31, 33 death, 4–6, 8, 29, 34, 43, 55, 62, 65, 68, 70, 75, 77, 80, 84–85, 87, 104, 106, 108, 112, 120, 122–23, 132–35, 140, 150, 153, 168, 180, 186, 227–28 DeLillo, Don, 2–5, 7, 9–10 depoliticization, 198 Derrida, Jacques, 115 Desastres de la Guerra, Los, 36, 39 development, 124–25, 149, 154–55, 158, 167–68, 172, 214, 237, 239 Devils or Demons, The, 83. See also Possessed, The Diary of a Writer, The, 89, 92 dictation secretary, 142 dictator, 16, 123, 147, 151, 160 dictatorship, 12, 16, 147–49, 151–52, 155, 158–60 didactic function, 170 direct media art, 41, 46, 48, 52, 55–56 Disapparition, 119 Disgrace, 129, 142 Doctor Strangelove, 213 Dolto, Françoise, 124–26 Donald, Stephanie, 166, 171 Dongzi, Pan, 177 Dostoievski à Manhattan, 83 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhail, 9, 14, 16, 22, 83–84, 87–95 Duo, Duo, 173 Eaglestone, Robert, 114, 116–19, 125 Eagleton, Terry, 83

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Egoyan, Atom, 17, 185, 203 Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 212 Elderfield, John, 28, 30, 34–35 Elizabeth Costello, 15, 129, 131, 142 Ellis, Brett Easton, 9 Ellsberg, Daniel, 207–8 Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 25 Engels, Friedrich, 10 Escena de Avanzada, 155, 163 Espèces d’espaces, 44 Ethical Irrationality of the World (relation between ends and means), 190, 194–95, 199 ethics classical, 189, 191, 193, 196, 202–4 political, 189, 191, 194, 196–97, 200–204 ethics and politics, 134, 185–86, 189, 199–201, 204 ethics of conviction, 190 ethics of responsibility, 197, 202 ethnic cleansing, 6 ethos, 64, 66–67, 74, 77, 143 Evans, Harriet, 166, 171 evil, 14–15, 70, 73, 85, 92–95, 97–98, 102, 104, 106–8, 130, 135, 138–41, 185–86, 189–91, 193–95, 197, 200–201, 204, 212, 214–15, 223 lesser evil/greater evil relation, 191, 197, 201, 204 Execution of Emperor Maximilian, The, 12, 26–27, 34 Falling Man, 2, 10 Fatelessness, 117–18 Father, 55 Fathers and Sons, 86 fear, 13, 33, 42–43, 51, 55, 62–64, 68, 73, 75, 77, 87, 102, 118, 150, 152, 160, 165–66, 175–76, 178, 180–81, 195, 219, 227–28, 230–33, 236, 238–41 Felman, Shoshona, 114, 116

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Female Suicide Bombers for Male Suicide Bombers, 49 Feng, Lei, 177 Fenton, Roger, 30 Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, 34–35 fiction, 7, 9, 62, 88–89, 93, 113–16, 118, 122–26, 129–31, 141, 157, 211–18, 220–22 film, 1, 4, 9–11, 17, 58, 68, 72, 157–58, 185–86, 188, 191, 193–94, 199, 201 five black categories, 174 flesh-and-blood author, 130, 139 focalization point of view, 7, 115, 118, 128, 130–31, 141 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 4–5 folk art, 167, 172 fortuna, 190, 195, 199, 204 Foucault, Michel, 18, 22, 65, 74, 227–41, 243 Four Olds, 170 Fragments, 117 France, 25–26, 119, 125, 211 Franz Joseph, 25 Freiman, Tami Katz, 48 French Revolution, 85, 239 Freud, Sigmund, 123–25 Fulbrook, Mary, 152 Fundamentalism, 14 Fuss, Diana, 114, 117 genealogy, 239 Genette, Gérard, 130 genocide, 14, 97–99, 103–4, 110 Germany, 14, 50, 69, 210, 212 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 150–51 Gil, Carmit, 44, 48 Glamorama, 9 Glucksmann, André, 83–85, 90, 94 good, 14–15, 73, 85, 94, 97–98, 102, 106–8, 170, 185–86, 189–202, 204 common good-individual good relation, 190–92, 195, 197–200, 202

Good Terrorist, The, 6 governing tool, 174 governmental control, 16, 165–66, 173, 175, 178, 181 governmental terrorism, 165 Goya, Francisco de, 27, 30, 36, 39 Great Dictator, The, 123 Great Leap Forward, 169–70 Greco-Roman, 189 culture, 240 philosophy, 227–28 Greenwald, Alice, 40 Guernica, 29 Hamid, Mohsin, 8–9 Heartney, Eleanor, 35 Heart of Darkness, 211 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 209, 240 Heidegger, Martin, 62 Heiman, Michal, 54–55, 58 Here: Remembering 9/11, 40 Hersh, Seymour, 32, 35–36 Hirsch, Marianne, 28 Hirst, Damien, 42–43, 56–57, 62, 70, 79–80 historiography, 18, 99, 114–16 Hitler, Adolf, 97, 138–40 Holding 13, 55, 58 Holding 3, 55, 58 Holocaust, 14–15, 22, 49–51, 63, 65, 97–100, 114–22, 125–26, 129, 133, 135–36, 139, 142 as a modernist event, 14, 99–100 Holocaust and the Postmodern, The, 114 Holocaust victims, 116, 119, 133, 136 Holy Terror, 83 Hongtu, Zhang, 181 Horesh, Yoav, 49, 58 horror, 4, 6, 8, 13, 43, 46, 48–49, 54, 56, 61, 63–64, 77, 90, 102, 116–17, 123, 133, 135, 138–39, 186

Index How Russia Shaped the Modern World, 87 Hulan, Liu, 177 humanism, 93, 137 humanities, 130, 137 humanity, 37, 85, 90, 142–43, 189 Hussein, Qusay, 46 Hussein, Saddam, 35, 44, 46, 48, 222 Hussein, Uday, 46 Hustvedt, Siri, 9 identification, 13, 28, 36, 69–70, 74, 114–19, 125–26, 128, 131, 143, 178 Identification Papers, 114 If This is a Man, 100, 103 image, 2, 6, 10–11, 13, 17, 21–22, 29–30, 32–34, 36, 40, 42–46, 48–59, 61–64, 66–69, 73–79, 109, 111, 114, 137, 141, 147, 156, 161, 165, 169–70, 176, 181, 212–14, 217, 219, 222 imagination, 7, 22, 118, 125–26, 134–35, 137, 210–12 I’m Here, 52–54 implied author, 139, 143 Inarrítu, Alejandro Gonzales, 1 India, 4, 35 integral testimony, 14, 99, 103 integral witnesses, 104–5 Intepretation of Dreams, The, 123 In the Shadow of No Towers, 1 Intifada, 13, 41, 48–49, 58 intransitive writing, 18, 99–100, 102–3 intransitive aspects of Levi’s text, 102 Iraq, 32, 34, 36–37, 39, 62, 217, 221–23 irrational, 68, 70, 192, 237–39 I Saw This, 40 Israel, 13, 41, 43–44, 49, 51, 76 Israeli art, 41, 43, 49–50, 52, 56–58 Jacobi, Friedrich, 85 Jahn, Manfred, 7

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Janiak, David, 3, 10 Jesus, 91–92, 138 jihad, 48 Johnson, Lyndon B., 208 Juarez, Benito, 25–26 Judeo-Christian, 189, 191, 204 July Theses, 151, 157 Kafka, Franz, 67 Kant, Immanuel, 65–66, 72, 211 Kashmir, 2, 5–6 Kertesz, Imre, 117–18 Khalil, Abdul Karim, 37 kitsch, 48 knowledge, 7, 22, 27–28, 31, 35, 57, 65, 67–68, 72, 79, 104, 118, 125, 201, 228, 231 Koren, Ziv, 53–54 Kratsman, Miki, 44–45, 50, 58 Kraus, Karl, 64 Kritzman, Lawrence D., 120 Kubrick, Stanley, 213 Ku-Klux-Klan, 52 Lacan, Jacques, 123–25 LaCapra, Dominick, 3, 20, 99, 108, 112, 128, 138–39 Landsberger, Stefan R., 177 Lang, Berel, 99, 116 language, 2, 5, 56, 67, 84, 99, 101, 107, 118, 129, 133–34, 139, 157–58, 199, 208–9 Laub, Dori, 114–15 Lebanon, 62 Le Bon, Gustave, 42 Lejeune, Philippe, 124 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 6, 168 Lessing, Doris, 6–7 Levi, Primo, 14, 97, 99–100, 107, 110, 118 Leviathan, 6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 72 Lewis, Bernard, 84

248

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lie, 16, 109–10, 115, 187–88, 194–96, 198, 210, 216–17. See also lying; truth Life of Pi, The, 135 literature, 1, 7, 9, 11, 14, 18–19, 57, 63, 70, 98, 114, 117, 119, 125–26, 148, 157, 167–68, 180 Little Red Book, The, 174 logos, 227, 230–31, 234–36, 238, 240 lying, 15, 17–18, 98, 109, 194, 196, 207–10, 212–15, 218, 222. See also lie Lyotard, Jean-François, 72

Mesnard, Philippe, 105 Mexico, 25–27 Min, Anchee, 177–78 Miramón, Miguel, 26, 28 Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, Les, 39 model books, 171 Moneda, La, 147 music, 18, 67, 148, 155, 157–59, 163, 233, 235–36, 238–41 music and paideia (Platonic concept of ), 234–40 Musil, Robert, 12, 18

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 17, 185–86, 189–91, 194, 196–98, 201–2, 204, 210, 239 Maistre, Joseph de, 85–86 Man/Dog Teams, 51 Manea, Norman, 147, 157 Manet, Edouard, 12, 25–28, 30–31, 34–36, 39 Man from Abu Ghraib, A, 37 Manhattan, 2–4, 83 Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Der, 12 Mao badge, 174 Mao’s portrait, 174–75, 180 Mao Zedong, 11, 17, 156, 166, 168, 170, 172–76, 178, 180–81 Margalit, Avishai, 92 Marks, Stephen, 87 Martel, Yann, 135 Marx, Karl, 10, 155 Massacre in the Cathedral, 36 Master of Petersburg, The, 9 Mauss, 119 Maximilian, 25–28, 35–36, 39 McEwan, Ian, 9, 131 McKenna, Andrew, 90 Mejía, Tomás, 26, 28 Mémorial Diplomatique, Le, 26 Mencius, 167 mental terror, 16–17, 165–66, 176, 179 mental violence, 175–76, 180

Nadezhdin, Nikolai, 86 Nagel, Thomas, 134 Napoleon III, 25–26 narrative, 3, 6, 9, 28, 32, 62, 73, 85, 93–94, 102, 114–16, 118–20, 126, 130, 144, 220 narrativization, 126 narratology, 19 narrator, 5–6, 8–9, 15, 117–18, 120–23, 126, 131–32, 141 nationalism, 4, 88, 149–50, 152, 154, 202 Nazi genocide, 14, 98–99, 103–4 Nazi Germany, 14, 50 Nazis, 49–51, 105–7, 111, 134 Nechaev, Sergei, 86–91, 94 New Year pictures, 167–68 New Yorker, The, 35–36 New York Review of Books, The, 207 New York Times, The, 35, 37, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 84, 98, 107, 238, 241 novel, 2–9, 14–16, 22, 83–84, 86–91, 93–94, 116, 119–20, 129–30, 138, 141–43, 174, 203 Nussbaum, Martha, 114 Obeyed, Ramez, 52 Occidentalism, 84, 92

Index Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, 92 Om el Phaem, 45 Ondaatje, Michael, 2, 9 On Photography, 39, 63 Orientalism, 84 origins, 46, 50, 65, 67–69, 75, 77, 84, 107 Origins of Totalitarianism, The, 107 painting, 11, 26–30, 34, 36, 39, 57, 70, 156, 179–80 paintings, 13, 27–31, 34–37, 39–40, 44, 156, 170–71, 179–80 Pakistan, 4–5, 8 Palestine, 50 Palmer, Alan, 131 Pentagon Papers, The, 17, 207–9, 212–13, 217 People’s Republic of China, 169 Perec, Georges, 4, 15, 44, 113, 119–26 perpetrators, 6, 14, 32–36, 57, 65, 104, 135, 139, 142 Petersburg, 16 Peter the Great, 21, 92 Phelan, James, 130 photographs, Abu Ghraib, 13, 32–37 potential to communicate emotions, 34 Western discourse on Abu Ghraib photographs, 32–33 photography, 10–12, 25, 28–29, 31, 58, 63 aerial photography, 29 desensitizing effect of, 25, 31 war photography, 29 Picador is Unhorsed and Falls under the Bull, A, 30 Picasso, Pablo, 29 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 187–88 Pihlainen, Kalle, 114 Pinochet, Augusto Ugarte, 12, 148–54, 156, 159–61 Pintilie, Lucian, 158 Plato, 169, 204, 236, 240

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249

political art, 12, 19, 26–27, 41–44, 46, 49, 69–70, 74, 76 political judgment of the genocide, 98 political language, 199 political logic, 189, 191 political power, 151, 154, 190, 233 politics, 9, 12, 16, 18, 26, 29, 35, 41–42, 57, 63–65, 68–75, 77, 79, 85, 108–9, 134, 147–48, 153, 155, 167–69, 185–86, 189–91, 196, 198–202, 204, 207, 209–10, 212, 214, 216, 218–21, 234 Populists (narodniki), 88 positive role models, 167, 171, 177, 181 Possessed, The, 14, 83, 88–91, 93–94. See also Devils or Demons, The posters, 16, 165–66, 169–81 posttrauma, 46, 49 power, 3, 20, 36, 44, 49–50, 56, 73–74, 97, 109–10, 114, 133, 136, 140–41, 147–48, 150–54, 160, 169–70, 173–76, 190, 198, 207, 209, 215, 229, 232–33, 236–40, 243 Precarious Life, 219 Prisonieros, Los, 159 professional artists, 167, 179–80 propaganda posters, 16, 165–66, 169–70, 178–79, 181 Proust, Marcel, 211 Pushkin, Alexander, 9, 21–22 Qing, Jiang, 171 Quinzaine littéraire, 122 Rancière, Jacques, 63, 71–75, 77 rational, 65, 67, 84, 189, 202, 216, 234, 236–37, 241 Raz, Guy, 43–44, 48, 58, 63, 75–77 reading, 8–9, 11, 14, 17, 19–20, 30, 41, 44, 67, 72, 93, 98, 101, 104, 106, 114, 116, 123–24, 127, 129, 141–42, 187, 227, 234

250

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Index

realism, 5, 100, 130–32, 138, 150, 160, 169, 171–72 reality, 2, 12, 16–17, 19, 43–46, 49, 52, 55, 62, 64–66, 71, 94, 100, 102, 109, 111, 113, 115–16, 124, 159, 169–72, 175–77, 180–81, 190, 199, 202, 208–20, 222 Recherce, 211 Reconstituirea, 158 Red Guards, 175–76 red sun, 173 Reeb, David, 44–46, 50, 58 Reflections on the French Revolution, 199 regime, 16, 25, 34, 123, 147–61, 213, 219 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The, 8 Remember! From Generation to Generation, 50 resistance, 1, 3–4, 18, 35, 75, 108, 116, 118–19, 132, 142, 147, 159, 227, 230–33, 238–39 revolutionary hero, 173 revolutionary literature and art, 168 Riffaterre, Michael, 114, 126 Romania, 12, 16, 147, 150–55, 158, 213 Runia, Eelco, 11, 139 Rushdie, Salman, 2, 4–7, 9 Russia, 14, 22, 85–94 Saletti, Carlo, 105 Sater, William F., 149 Saturday, 9, 131 scar art, 167, 180 Schindler’s List, 117 Schlegel, Friedrich, 85–86 Schmitt, Carl, 106–7, 204 September 11, 2001, 1–2, 42, 57, 62, 83, 89, 93, 149, 218–20. See also 9/11 Se questo è un uomo, 118 Settlers, 50 Shalimar the Clown, 4–5 Shamir, Yitzchak, 50

Skinner, Quentin, 204 Slow Man, 142 Smith, Roberta, 37 socialist hero, 172 socialist realism, 150, 160, 169 socialist utopia, 166, 171, 176, 179, 181 society, 16–17, 26, 35, 44, 51, 70, 74, 89–90, 92, 121–22, 124, 149–50, 152–57, 161, 167, 170, 172, 178, 180–81, 237 Socrates, 204 Sodaey, Merav, 48–49, 55, 58 Solomons, Doron, 55, 59 sonorous art, 18, 227, 233, 235–36, 238 Sontag, Susan, 19–20, 31, 39, 44, 63 sound, 18, 134, 136, 161, 227, 233–36, 240–41 Spanish Civil War, 29 Spanish Soldier Drops Dead with a Bullet through His Head, July 12, 1937, 29 spectator (subject position of ), 12, 25, 30, 37, 64–65, 74, 139 Spiegelman, Art, 1, 5, 9, 119 Spielberg, Steven, 117 Stalin, Joseph, 156 St˘anescu, Nichita, 157 Steiner, George, 116 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 42 stoicism, 204 Streicher, Julius, 50 Stürmer, Der, 50 subject, 14, 18, 22, 39, 48, 65–66, 68, 71, 79, 83, 94, 100, 115, 117, 131, 158, 166, 169, 172, 198, 201, 216, 218–19, 229–31, 233, 241 suicide bombing(s), 3, 42–43, 49, 53 Swastika, 50–51 Sweet Hereafter, The, 17, 185–86, 203 Tartakover, David, 52–55 temporality, 3, 61–63, 66–68, 70, 73, 78

Index terror, ix, 1–6, 9–19, 23, 41–44, 46, 48–50, 52–53, 55–58, 61–65, 68, 73–74, 76–77, 81, 83–86, 89–90, 93–95, 97–98, 110–11, 116, 129, 137, 139, 143, 145, 149–50, 152, 161, 165–67, 172, 175–76, 179–82, 205, 212–13, 222, 227–28, 230–36, 238–41 terror (governmental), 11, 16–17, 145, 180, 182 terrorism, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 33, 41–42, 56, 73, 83–86, 89–90, 93–94, 97–98, 110, 165–66, 181 terrorist, 1–2, 4–9, 14, 22, 42–43, 48, 52, 56–57, 62, 65, 73, 83–84, 88, 94, 131, 166, 181, 215, 218–19, 222 Terrorist, 8, 131 testimonial, 5, 116, 155, 157 theater, 73–74, 155, 157–58 Theorien der deutschen Faschismus, 69 Third Reich, 97, 101, 133 time, 2, 5, 10–11, 14, 18–19, 22, 32, 42–43, 61–68, 71–73, 75–78, 85, 103, 111, 115, 161, 171, 179, 237 Tism˘aneanu, Vladimir, 152 totalitarian, 2, 16–17, 97, 119, 147, 149–51, 154, 156, 212–13, 219 totalitarian governments, 2 totalitarianism, 97–98, 107 trauma, 1–3, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 41–42, 46, 48–49, 51, 57, 102, 113, 120, 122, 124–27, 129, 135, 138–43, 166 trauma, transitional, 138–39 Treblinka, 133 truth, 14–16, 63, 65–66, 68, 74, 94, 98–99, 109–11, 113–14, 122–23, 126–27, 176–78, 185, 187–92, 194, 196, 210, 214, 216, 218, 222, 228, 231–33. See also lie; lying Truth and Politics, 210

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251

truth-teller (as politician), 109–10 Levi as a truth-teller, 14–15, 97–99, 109–10 standpoint of the truth-teller, 109 Tsar Alexander II, 88 Turgenev, Ivan, 86 TWA, 52, 57 Twin Towers, 2, 8, 42, 65, 218 Two Seconds, 43, 58, 63, 75–76 Ullman, Micha, 42 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 165 unpolitical, 190 untitled (Dganit Berest), 52 Updike, John, 7–8, 131 values, 10, 32–33, 69–70, 73–74, 84, 106, 152, 160, 167, 169, 172, 181, 190–92, 197–98, 200–202, 216 fight for, 190, 198, 201–2 science, 190, 201 Vie mode d’emploi, La, 119, 121, 123 Vietnam, 207–8, 214–16, 223 violence, 1–2, 4, 11–14, 17–18, 29–31, 42, 55, 78, 85–87, 90–91, 94, 117, 165–66, 168, 173, 175–76, 180–81, 190–91, 194–95, 198, 200, 202, 207, 214, 216, 218–21, 232, 238 Virilio, Paul, 42 visual arts, 11, 148, 155–56, 167, 170, 180 visual studies, 18 Vogl, Joseph, 34 voice, 2, 18, 22, 35, 40, 92–93, 99–102, 105–6, 126, 133, 140, 142–43, 188, 227, 235–36, 240 Wackstein, David, 50–51 Waiting for the Barbarians, 129 Waked, Sharif, 46, 58 Wall, The, 52–53 Washington Post, The, 207

252

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Index

Weber, Max, 17, 185–86, 189–90, 194, 196–98, 200–202 Weinstein, Gal, 46–48, 51, 54 Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 42 Where are the Soldiers?, 45–46, 58 White, Hayden, 14, 98–100, 115, 118 Wilkomirski, Benjamin, 117 Winkler, Gaspard, 120–21, 123, 125 witness, 6–7, 9, 33, 56, 98, 103–6, 108, 110, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 125, 187, 195 integral witnesses, 104–5 Levi as a permanent witness, 103 survivors as witnesses, 104–6, 108 witnessing, 33, 98, 103, 115–16, 216–17

witnessing the Holocaust, 98 women, 5, 35, 48, 62, 172, 175, 177–78, 216 working through, 1, 13, 17, 112, 139; acting out, 3, 139–40 World Trade Center Memorial (New York City), 40 World War I, 29, 210 World War II, 97, 119, 207, 213 W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 15, 113, 119–21 Xun, Lu, 167 Yan’an period, 167 Z˘i˘zek, Slavoj, 42