The Sovereignty of the Image #1: Obscene Images

Today I begin posting the draft of yet another chapter for what I hope will eventually become a book on trauma and philosophy–the first of two devoted to the same general topic.  I am calling this chapter “Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” with the one to follow to be called “Representation and Trauma II:  The Image of Sovereignty.”

* * * * *

Men and women, sometimes even holding hands, jumping from the upper floors of the Twin Towers, preferring that way of dying to being burned alive by the fires raging behind them:  For many horrified spectators around the world watching on television during the events that took place in New York on September 11, 2001, there was something obscene about what seemed to be the compulsive broadcasting and rebroadcasting of those images.  Hundreds of millions worldwide saw them in the endless loop of replays that continued for a time after the Towers collapsed, before the mass media began to hold them back, in real or pretended sensitivity to how offensive they might be to large segments of their audience.

However, just wherein did the obscenity of the broadcasting and rebroadcasting of those images consist, for those who so perceived it?  Were the broadcasting and rebroadcasting obscene insofar as some sort of blatant exploitation of those horrible images for private gain might be suspected—for example, that some television network or other outlet might have been using them to build ratings?  Yet even many viewers who imputed no such motives to the broadcasters still experienced something obscene about what came across to them as the compulsive broadcasting of the images at issue.  What seemed obscene to such viewers was that those images were broadcast at all, regardless of the broadcasters’ motives.  To them, or at least some of them, there is something obscene about the very endeavor to represent trauma in images at all.

There is a sense in which any representation whatever of such public traumas as “9/11” or, to introduce another example (or reservoir for many examples), “Ausshwitz”–that is, the Holocaust–can be taken to entail a sort of exploitation of the suffering of others, regardless of conscious intention.  For such an understanding, the very representation of traumatic events, or at least of such public, historic ones as the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the Holocaust, is in a way a moral violation of the victims of such trauma—a perpetuation and repetition of their traumatization or wounding, a compounding of the harm and suffering already inflicted upon them.  By that way of perceiving things, the mere endeavor to represent trauma constitutes a sort of obscenity and blasphemy against those who have traumatized.   As Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in a passage I have already cited in the chapter on “Our Debt to the Dead,” in Heidegger and “the jews” (page 27):  “One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.”

As the title of his book suggests, Lyotard makes that remark in the context of discussing the Holocaust.  Lyotard sees something morally problematic about any effort to representing the Nazi “extermination” of the Jews in pictures or even in words.  “If one represents the extermination,” Lyotard writes, “it is also necessary to represent the exterminated.”  Accordingly, one ends up representing “men, women, children [being] treated like ‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘rats,’ ‘vermin,’ subjected to humiliation, constrained to abjection, driven to despair, thrown like filth into the ovens.”  However, in so representing those who were exterminated, “this representation forgets something,” something essential to remember.  “For it is not as men, women, and children that they are exterminated but as the name of what is evil—‘jews’—that the Occident has given to [its own] unconscious anxiety.”

Thus, under the very pretense of protecting the memory of the exterminated, representing them as men, women, and children—and how else is one supposed to represent them?—one inadvertently ends up perpetuating the very movement of extermination, of erasure of the truth about what was done to those exterminated.  Once again they are themselves thereby reduced to just another representation, as they had already been reduced by their executioners, their “exterminators,” to mere representatives of incarnate evil—“the jews,” as Lyotard puts it—to be exterminated in the first place.

Avoiding such unintentional exploitation of the victims of trauma is no easy matter, however.  Even critics who explicitly discern such exploitation in others’ representations, in works of cinema, books, or other forms, tend to fall prey to the same fault in their own accounts.  So, for example, in The New York Times for Sunday, January 9, 2009, in a piece called “Telling the Holocaust Like It Wasn’t,” Jacob Heilbrunn comments critically on a rash of recently released films all of which concerned the Holocaust in one way or another. Heilbrunn sets the tone for his whole critique by citing a scene from one of those films:  “Toward the end of the new film about postwar Germany  ’The Reader,’ a Holocaust survivor in New York curtly instructs a visiting German lawyer named Michael Berg that he would do well to remember that the camps were neither a form of therapy nor a university.  ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘came out of the camps.  Nothing.’”  Heilbrun insists that the films at issue, including The Reader, end up forgetting that point, by making the Holocaust serve some sort of “narrative of redemption.”

Later, however, at the beginning of his own two-paragraph closing, Heilbrunn effectively takes back what he has earlier given the reader in that opening passage.  “Perhaps,” he writes at the end of his article, “nothing came out of the Holocaust other than the determination to prevent a repetition of the crimes.”  Yet with such an ending Heilbrunn, despite himself one may assume, undercuts the very critique he has just given.  Having written that “the further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it’s being exploited to create a narrative of redemption,” he turns right around and offers nothing short of a redemption story of his own.  Thus, he too ends up exploiting what, by his own lights, is never to be exploited.

Our Debt to the Dead #6: The Soul’s Swoon, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Prayer of Death

What follows is the conclusion to my draft of a chapter tentatively entitled “Our Debt to the Dead,” which I hope eventually to make part of a book on trauma and philosophy

* * * * *

All efforts to hold death at bay by retaining the memory of the dead, even just their names, ultimately fail.  Sooner or later, but inexorably, even the mere names of the dead vanish into the anonymous grave.  To be forgotten is the final destiny common to all, the living and the dead alike.  When at last all ways of avoidance are blocked, and one is finally forced, by the accidents of one’s life, to face the abyss of death and the grave’s oblivion and silence, all that the still living soul can do is swoon, as Gabriel’s soul does at the end of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Interestingly, toward the end of the same century near the beginning of which Joyce wrote his great story, John Updike painted a similar portrait of the soul’s swoon.  In Memories of the Ford Administration, which is at one level a novel about the distortions, limitations, and ultimate losses of memory itself, first published in 1992 (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf), the overall story Updike tells involves the interplay of two included lesser stories, one of which is that James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States (about whose dying Updike had earlier also written a play).  Toward the end of the novel, in the final section devoted to Buchanan, Updike depicts him near the very end of his Presidency, when all his efforts to avoid the Union rupturing in two have finally collapsed in failure, and Buchanan himself knows that the nation is falling into the abyss of civil war.  Buchanan, the United States’ only bachelor President, is alone in his rooms.  Updike writes (pages 316-318):

He sleepily prayed, and the silence into which his brain poured its half-formed words, the sense melting like wax at the edge of the flaming wick, tonight seemed itself a message, tuned to his great weariness.  He saw for a moment through not his own mismatched eyes but through God’s clear colorless ones; he saw that sub specie aeternitatis nothing greatly matters:  not his own life, his ambitions, his patient intricate craven search for power, nor, cruel as the thought might appear from a wakeful perspective, the lives of the nation, the millions as they strain toward him for rescue.  The hordes of the Sennacherib invaded Israel, and the Temple was destroyed stone by stone, and yet within the beautiful dispassion of God these cataclysms had been cradled, and now slept unremembered but by a few.  While Buchanan had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James, British educated opinion had been considerably agitated by the apparent discoveries, within geology, of tracts of time vaster than any the Bible disclosed:  Buchanan now perceived a cause for serenity here, a vastness that dwindled all our agitations to a scarcely perceptible stir, and our mountains and chasms to a prairie smoothness, a luminous smoothness like that of Greenland, or of the unexpected southernmost continent first sighted by Captain Cook.  Having been long troubled by the silence into which his prayers seemed to sink without an echo, Buchanan in his majestic figure appreciated that the silence was an answer, the only answer whose mercy was lasting, impartial, and omnipresent. . . . As if though the gimlet eye of an eagle soaring in God’s silent winds Buchanan saw the nation beneath him, a colorful small mountain meadow scurrying with frantic life; its life would perish but infallibly renew itself in the turning of seasons, in the great and impervious planetary motions.  Thus reassured, the old man sank on a sustained note of praise into the void and woke with surprise into a still-stormy world where it seemed all but himself had tossed sleepless through the night.

To swoon in the face of death and the dead, in the sense that Joyce’s Gabriel and Updike’s Buchanan do, is to give relinquish all claim to ownership over death and, therewith, over oneself.  It is literally to “let oneself go”—both in the sense of “losing control of oneself” and in the sense of “allowing oneself to leave.”   Where one goes, once so let go, is into the same abyss before which one can only swoon:  the very abyss of death, in all its silence and oblivion.

In swooning, we, still living, die ourselves in turn, thereby responding to the invitation–to follow them–that all the dead who have gone before have extended to us.  To swoon as Joyce’s Gabriel or Updike’s Buchanan does is t0 accept that invitation, and enter into death ourselves.

Entering death in such a swoon has nothing necessarily to do with killing oneself, with taking one’s own life, in the sense that we use those expressions to talk of suicide.  Although under certain circumstances, such as those Jean Améry articulates, it may be that suicide is how a given soul’s swoon takes shape, under other, probably far more common circumstances, suicide is a way of pressing one’s claims to ownership, rather than abandoning them.

At any rate, there is nothing of self-assertion in the soul’s swoon before death, letting itself go into the Joycean community in death of “all the living and the dead.”  Rather, as is implicit in Joyce and explicit in Updike, the swoon is prayerful.  It is itself prayer in the most fundamental sense, in which to pray is to praise, just as Updike’s Buchanan sinks “into the void” in “a sustained note of praise.”

Independently of both Joyce and Updike, or at least independently of reference to either, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has recently, in his book Dis-Enclosure:  The Deconstruction of Christianity (translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith [New York:  Fordham University Press, 2008), articulated prayer in a way excellently suited to capture what is at stake here.  At the end of an essay entitled "Prayer Demythified" he writes the following reflections, which illuminate “fanaticism” as the most destructive form of the endeavor, in effect (though Nancy does not put it this way, at least at this point in his text), to avoid or deny the abyss of death, rather than prayerfully to swoon into it, as Buchanan does.

What Nancy says applies not only to contemporary religious fanaticism of whatever sort, whether Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian--the latter as exemplified recently by the murder in Kansas in the spring of 2009 of Dr. George Tiller, murdered in the name of the protection of the "rights of the as yet unborn," as it is sometimes put.  It also applies to Nazi and fascist fanaticism, as Nancy's own remarks make clear, and to all other forms of political fanaticism, whether "religious" in professed motivation or not.  Above all, Nancy's analysis casts light on the connections between distortions of language and the fanatical avoidance of death and its trauma.

Thus, at the end of his essay on prayer Nancy writes:  "Fanaticism is nothing but the abolition of the intractable distance of the real [the traumatic structure of "reality" as such, in effect], and consequently also the extinction of prayer and all speech, in favor of effusive outpouring, eructation, and vociferation.”   In contrast to all such denial and distortion, prayer as such, as he has been arguing in the preceding pages of his essay, is nothing but the lifting up, the elevation, of the very speaking and saying that is prayer itself.  Hence, he goes on, after his remark on fanaticism, to write:

In the elevation of prayer, a supplication also, albeit ”accessory,” cannot fail to intervene, for in it [that is, in prayer] is revealed the “poverty” [of all human speech itself].  The fact is “poor humanity” may have nothing else to pray.  Prayer thus conceived does not enrich, does not remunerate the “poor humanity” that we today have just as many reasons to bemoan [as ever].  It carries poverty over to saying–and it isn’t poverty but saying that is obliterated in this prayer.  Does not the same apply (isn’t it the same thing) to the saying of love, the saying of mourning, and the saying of speech itself?

However that may be–and clearly the questions function rhetorically here–Nancy concludes that to

concern ourselves with this empty remnant [Note that term!] of prayer, [to] remain faithful to this obligation [to pray the poor prayer of poor humanity]. . . , [f]or us . . . has the force of a categorical imperative, for nothing today is more important than this:  to empty and let be emptied out all prayers that negotiate a sense, an issue, or a repatriation of the real within the narrow confines of our faded humanisms and clenched religiosities, in order that we may merely open speech once again to its most proper possibility of address, which also makes up all its sense and all its truth.

The gift that the dead give us in their very dying calls for just and only such prayer as response–a prayer that utterly exhausts itself in lifting up death and the dead themselves, and, in so raising them up, obliterates not death and the dead but the praying voice itself, which vanishes behind what it exhausts itself in lifting up.  Such a empty remnant of prayer, which expropriates those who pray–dis-appropriating them of all their own property, in order that they may at last pray properly–is the only proper prayer–indeed, the only proper speech–of those remnant communities, as I would called them, and as I will discuss in more detail in time, that are the only real communities, in any world of shared death such as our own.

The prayer Updike’s Buchanan offers up as he sinks into the void is praise of that same void, the void of silence and oblivion that is death itself.  In his soul’s swoon Buchanan’s prays the prayer of death, praising it and “raising up” the dead themselves, as I made a point of putting it above.   In the prayer that exhausts itself in lifting up the dead themselves, there thus occurs what, following Nancy, who himself here follows a long Christian (at least) tradition, we can call a resurrection of the dead.

However, that could only be in the sense of “resurrection” that Nancy himself discerns in the writings of Maurice Blanchot.  In “Blanchot’s Ressurection,” another essays in Dis-Enclosure, Nancy insists (page 89) that the “resurrection” in question is one which “does not escape death, nor recover from it,” but which rather “constitutes the extremity and truth of the phenomenon of dying.”  The movement of such resurrection “goes into death not to pass through it but, sinking irreversibly into it,” just as Buchanan sinks into the (same) void, “to resuscitate death itself.”

Resuscitating death itself, Nancy goes on, “is entirely different from resuscitating the dead,” at least insofar as that is taken to mean “to bring them back to life, to bring life back where death had destroyed it.”  That is, it is not a matter of what the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, persona non-grata to the Vatican since early in the papacy of John-Paul II, long before Nancy, who does not mention him, called, disparagingly, “the reanimation of a corpse.”   Not only Blanchot’s resurrection but also Küng’s involve no such reanimation of the dead themselves.  “Resuscitating death is an entirely different operation,” writes Nancy, the point of which is precisely “to let the dead be dead:  thus, to resurrect or resuscitate death, and the dead as [still] dead.”

To let the dead be dead is at the same time, Nancy also recognizes, to join them in dying, even while one still lives.  As he writes earlier in Dis-Enclosure, in an essay on the book of James in Christian scripture, an essay he calls “The Judeo-Christian (on Faith),”  “man” as he is emerging in ongoing changes “in the instituting configuration of the West” is (page 59)

no longer the mortal who stands before the immortal [a reference to Heidegger, though one I find questionable here].  He is becoming the dying one in a dying that doubles or lives the whole time of his life.  The divine withdraws from its dwelling sites–whether these be the peaks of Mount Olympus or of Sinai–and from every type of temple. It becomes, in so withdrawing, the perpetual imminence of dying.  Death, as the natural end of a mode of existence, is itself finite:  dying becomes the theme of existence according to the always suspended imminence of parousia [literally, presence or arrival—used in Christianity to refer to the Second Coming of Christ].

In accordance with such an understanding of the inseparable interweaving–the “identity” in the Heideggerian sense of “belonging-together”–of death and life, Nancy goes on in his very next paragraph to discuss the Christian sacrament of anointing the sick, especially the dying.  Sometimes called the sacrament of “extreme unction,” so marking the sick, writes Nancy,  “ signs not what will later be called life eternal beyond death.”  Rather, unction marks “the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred.  This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation.  In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah is a dying one.  The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortal.  The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable.”

Nancy then considers the Christian doctrine according to which “[d]eath is tied to sin.”  Considerably later in Dis-Enclosure, in an essay called “The Deconstruction of Christianiny,” Nancy argues that sin is not a “misdeed,” but a “condition.”   By his understanding, sin is the shared human condition of being in need of redemption (or salvation), insofar as in all human being there is a radical “indebtedness of existence itself” (just such indebtedness as I have tried to explicate earlier in this chapter in my discussion of Lifton and Heidegger on “guilt”), which the human being is “tempted” to deny or disavow, affirming instead the “self” and the self’s claim to independence, to ownership over itself, owing nothing to others before and apart from the self’s own voluntary commitments.  To “sin” is to give in to the temptation toward such self-affirmation, in the literal sense of affirming a “self” in the first place.  Nancy writes (pages 155-156):

Temptation is essentially the temptation of self, it is the self as temptation, as tempter, as self-tempter.  It is not in the least a question of the expiation of a misdeed, but of redemption or salvation, and salvation cannot come from the self itself, but from its opening . . . and as such it comes to it as the grace of its Creator. . . . Through salvation, God remits to man the debt he incurred in sinning, a debt that is none other than the debt of the self itself.  What man appropriated, for which he is in debt to God, is the self that he has turned in upon itself.  It must be returned to God and not to itself.  Sin is an indebtedness of existence as such.

In other words, while Heidegger tends to detach existential Schuldigkeit [guilt] from the category of “transgression” or of “debt” (in the ontic sense of the term), I wonder, rather, whether that Schuldigkeit does not realize the essence of sin as the indebtedness of existence–”indebtedness of existence” meaning, at one and the same time, that existence itself is in debt, and that which it is in debt for is precisely for itself, for itself, for the ipseity of existence.

My own reading of Heidegger on guilt, as I presented it earlier in this chapter, is one that takes Heidegger to be in full agreement with Nancy’s own interpretation of guilt, rather than at variance with it.  At any rate, my own agreement with the sort of interpretation of guilt Nancy offers is almost without qualification, my only qualification being that I suspect his account may still leave the difference-in-interconnection of guilt as the existential “indebtedness” he emphasizes, and guilt in a negative sense of being to blame for some misdeed, less than sufficiently clarified.  Ye his remarks themselves can be read in such a way as to point to the nexus of that interconnection-in-disconnection, insofar as they suggest that the basic “indebtedness of existence” grounds and manifests itself in the closure toward “self,” which then and as such is the refusal of the debt the living owe for the very fact of being alive at all.

The refusal at issue is a hardening of the self into its own claims of ownership over itself, as opposed to the recognition of fundamental indebtedness to the generosity of others.  It is stiffening of the self into selfishness, of the ego into egoism.  As the influential phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, one of Nancy’s French colleagues in philosophy, puts it in Being Given:  Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (translated by Jeffrey L, Kosky [Stanford University Press, 2002]), by refusing not just some specific debt but all indebtedness whatsoever, the self or ego hardens into an attitude of total ingratitude, insisting that it does not owe anyone for anything.  As Marion writes (pages 90-91):

The ingrate is defined first not by a negative will or his impotence to repay good with good, but by incapacity, impatience, and exasperation simply in receiving it [that is, a gift].  He refuses the charge not only of acquitting himself of this debt (which would remain within exchange), but of ever having incurred–of ever having been offered a gift.  He suffers from the very principle that a gift affects him by befalling him.  He does not refuse this or that gift with or without this or that objective support:  he refuses indebtedness pure and simple–or rather the admission of it.  In a stubborn struggle against the evidence of the gift already given and without his consent, the ingrate has the presence to maintain that his consent alone decides the gifts given to him.  He sticks strictly to the base principle that “I don’t owe anything to anyone” . . .

In contrast, to face one’s ineradicable indebtedness for even being at all is, as Marion writes a few pages later (page 101), to face “what phenomenologically and morally is the hardest ordeal” or all, the ordeal of “succeed[ing] in making an exception to the principle ‘I don’t owe anything to anybody.’ “

At any rate, to return to the connection of death to sin, according to Nancy’s interpretation in his essay in Dis-Enclosure on the Biblical letter of James–which stands in a relation of reciprocal reinforcement with what he writes in the essay, later in the book, on the deconstruction of Christianity–to say that death is tied to sin is to say that it is “tied to the deficiency of a life that does not practice faith.”  However, as he then adds, in a remark especially significant for my present purposes, the faith at issue is not one that life just happens on occasion to fail to practice.  Rather, life “cannot practice it” (my emphasis), at least “without failing or fainting–at the incommensurable height of dying”—just as Joyce’s Gabriel and Updike’s Buchanan fail and faint.

“Yet despite this,” Nancy concludes—and we might well change that to because of it—“faith gives.”  What it gives is “dying precisely in its incommensurability (to give death, ‘the gift of death,’ he [that other "James," namely, Jacques--French for James—Derrida, in a book of that title] says):  a gift that is not a matter of receiving in order to keep, any more than is love or poverty, or even veridicity (which are, ultimately, the same thing as dying).”

So, too, is prayer “the same thing as dying,” especially that prayer in which the living raise up the dead, dying after them in turn.  In that dying, we indemnify the dead, keeping them safe from harm and loss, allowing them their rest in the silent, silencing keep of death.

That is our debt to the dead.

Our Debt to the Dead #5: Dishonoring the Dead

Below is the continuation of my draft for what I hope will eventually become a book chapter–a chapter on “our debt to the dead.”

* * * * *

What do we owe the dead?  As I have noted before, in one way of taking that question—taking it, namely, to be a question concerning that for which we are indebted to the dead—the answer would be “everything.”  Furthermore, it is, as I have also noted before, in their very having died—that is, to put the same point a bit differently, precisely as dead—that the dead give us “everything.”

However, another way of taking the question of what we owe the dead–a way of taking it that is different, yet nevertheless inseparable, from the first–would be to take it as an inquiry about what would constitute proper response on the part of us, the living, to the dead, for what they have given us, the “everything” we owe them in the first sense.   Precisely given that what we owe the dead, in the first way of taking that notion, is “everything,” then just what would constitute a proper “response” to the dead, for what they have given us?  What response do the dead themselves, as dead, call upon us to make, given that we owe them everything?

What we owe the dead in that second sense of the question–that is, the response that would appropriately answer to the dead for what they have given us by and in their very dying–is to grant them in turn what I would like to call indemnity.  We owe the dead “indemnity” in the original etymological sense of that term whereby it means to keep from harm, to protect against loss.

How can the dead be harmed, however?  What more can they lose, given that they are already dead?  The most common answer would seem to be that they might lose their place in the memory of the living, and thereby suffer the harm of being forgotten.  Hence the common refrain of “Never forget!”  For example, Israelis admonish one another and the entire world to “never forget” what was done to the Jews of Europe in the Nazi extermination camps.  Or, to give a more recent example, bumper stickers and window decals carrying the same admonition never to forget those who lost their lives in the attacks of September 11, 2001, continue to show up on cars in the United States each fall.

Yet what we try in such ways never to forget will still eventually be forgotten, despite all our efforts at remembering.  Sooner or later, but inevitably, memory will fail.  The names of the dead, which we vowed never to forget, will be forgotten; and those who bore those names will sink into the great, anonymous mass of all the nameless dead of all the earlier ages.

Whatever can be remembered in the same sense that a name can be remembered, will inevitably be forgotten in time.  And even while the name is still remembered, there will come a time when the one who bore the name will no longer be, and only the name will remain. As Chrétien sees clearly, whatever can be remembered will be forgotten, and only what can never be remembered is truly unforgettable.

Before Chrétien, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote along the same lines, specifically with regard to the Jewish dead of the Holocaust.  In Heidegger and “the jews”, in a passage to which I will return in a later chapter on trauma and “representation,” Lyotard writes (page 27) that the Holocaust

cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words.  Representing ‘Auschwitz’ in images and words is a way of making us forget this.  I am not thinking here only of bad movies and widely distributed TV series, of bad novels or “eyewitness accounts.”  I am thinking of those very cases that, by their exactitude, their severity, are, or should be, best qualified not to let us forget.  But even they represent what, in order not to be forgotten as that which is forgotten itself, must remain unrepresentable.  Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah is an exception, maybe the only one. . . .

Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this might seem a good defense against forgetting it.  It is, I believe, just the opposite.  Only that which has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be effaced.  But what is not inscribed, through lack of inscribable surface, of duration and place for the inscription to be situated, . . . cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present “only” as an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of the spirit.  One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images.  One cannot escape the necessity of representing.  It would be sin itself to believe oneself safe and sound.  But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten, in writing.

It is to be feared that word representations (books, interviews) and thing representations (films, photographs) of the extermination of the Jews . . . by the Nazis bring back the very thing, . . . in the orbit of secondary repression. . . . It is to be feared that, through representation, it turns into an “ordinary” repression.  One will say, It was a great massacre, how horrible!  Of course, there have been others, “even” in contemporary Europe (the crimes of Stalin).  Finally, one will appeal to human rights, one cries out “never again” and that’s it!  It is taken care of.

A few lines later Lyotard contrasts all such endeavors “never to forget” the Holocaust–endeavors which, despite what may well be their authors’ own intentions, end up obfuscating and thereby perpetuating the very crime at issue—with what belongs “on the side of ‘the jews’” themselves.  He writes (pages 27-28):

One can represent the Nazi madness–make of it what it also is–an effect of “secondary” repression, a symptom; a way of transcribing anxiety, the terror in regard to the undetermined (which Germany knew well, especially then), into will, into political hatred, organized, administered, turned against the unconscious affect. . . . But on the side of “the jews,” absence of representability, absence of experience, absence of accumulation of experience (however multimillenial), interior innocence, smiling and hard, even arrogant, which neglects the world except with regard to its pain–these are the traits of a tradition where the forgotten remembers that it is forgotten; knows itself to be unforgettable, has no need of inscription, of looking after itself, a tradition where the soul’s only concern is with the terror without origin, where it tries desperately, humorously to originate itself by narrating itself.

The SS does not wage war against the Jews. . . . The war merely creates the din that is necessary to cover the silent crime. . . . –a second terror, a horror rather, practiced on the involuntary witness of the “first” terror, which is not even felt, not even lodged, but which is diffuse and remains in it like an interminably deferred debt.  In representing the second terror one ineluctably perpetuates it.  It is itself only representation. . . . One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.

Lyotard then sums up with a remark that can be generalized beyond efforts to remember the dead of the Holocaust, to apply to any efforts to remember any of the dead.  “All memory, in the traditional sense of representation,” he writes (my emphasis), “because it involves decision, includes and spreads the forgetting of the terror without origin that motivates it.”

We owe it to the dead, then, not to remember them, at least if remembering is taken “in the traditional sense,” wherein to remember the dead entails holding on to some “representation” of the dead, even if only their names.  Paradoxically, all such endeavors to honor the dead by always remembering them end up dis-honoring them.    It dishonors the dead by stripping them of the only thing left to them insofar as they are dead.  Instead of keeping the dead from harm, it harms them in the only way left to do so, once they are dead.  It harms the dead in that, far from protecting them against loss, it robs the dead of the one thing they still have:  their very death itself.   In an unusual but literal sense, it is a form of grave robbery.

Robbing the dead of their graves under the guise of remembering them is itself a way of attempting to gain control over death itself.  It is a matter of laying claim to what Robert Jay Lifton in Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003)—in which he drops, by the way and unfortunately to my mind, what I take to be his earlier fruitful suggestions, in Broken Connections, of a non-pathological concept of  ”survivor guilt” (which in this later work he calls “death guilt”)—calls “ownership of death.”   The dreams and assertions of a power so fantastic that it can lay claim to ownership even over death itself are built upon “profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness,” as Lifton writes (page 178), to cover those feelings over and avoid facing them.  What is behind such “a sense of megalomania and omnipotence” that extends even over death itself is, as Lifton observes a few lines later, “[f]ear of being out of control.”

Our fear of not being in control is always, at bottom, the fear of death, the point where we lose all control.  To avoid facing that fear, we are willing even to dishonor the dead, robbing them of their very death under the pretense of remembering them.

Before the alternative, that of facing the loss of all control, we can only swoon—as I will turn to next.

Our Debt to the Dead #4: Dying in Vain

Today’s post is a brief one, containing the next section of my draft of a chapter on “our debt to the dead” for what may become book on trauma and philosophy.  It is an entry that can also stand alone, in my judgment, without any further contextualizing introductory comments.

* * * * *

“If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!   Oh let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember you not, if I prize not Jerusalem above all my joys!” sings the Psalmist (Psalm 136/137: 5-6).  The question, however, is how to be sure it is Jerusalem one is remembering, and not some poor substitute–some mere image of the holy.  So it is, too, with remembering the dead:  To be sure it is the dead themselves we are remembering, and not some mere shade of our own imagining.

If we would remember the dead, and not substitute for them some idol of our own making, then we also need to remember, in effect, just why we should remember the dead in the first place.  For just what do we owe the dead our constant remembrance?  Just what have the dead given to us, the living, such that we have incurred such a debt toward them?

We owe the dead for their death.  (So, at least, I have been arguing.)  Their death, however, is a pure gift that the dead bestow upon the living.  As a pure gift, the death of the dead is like the grits in an anecdote from psychiatrist and popular spiritual teacher M. Scott Peck, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller The Road Less Traveled.  In What Return Can I Make?  The Dimensions of the Christian Experience, written with Patricia Kay and Marilyn Von Waldner (Simon and Schuster, 1985), Peck tells the story of how once when he was served grits on the side in a restaurant in the American South, he remarked to the woman waiting on him that he had not ordered grits.  “You don’t order grits,” she replied by Peck’s account.  “ They just comes.”

Peck uses that anecdote to say that God’s grace is like grits:  One doesn’t ask for grace.  It just comes.

St. Paul is the ultimate source for such a Christian understanding of grace.  For Paul, grace is a pure gift freely bestowed by God upon those who receive it.  The Greek word Paul uses for “gift” is dōrean.   In St. Paul:  The Foundations of Universalism (translated by Ray Brassier, University of Chicago Press, 2003), Alain Badiou—a very different writer than M. Scott Peck, whom Badiou nonetheless unintentionally echoes on this point–writes concerning that Greek term:  “Dōrean is a powerful word; it means ‘as a pure gift,’ ‘without cause,’ and even ‘in vain.’”

Any pure gift is always given “in vain” in that sense.  That applies not only to God’s grace as Paul conceived it, but also to the pure gift that the dead give to us, the living, in their very dying.  Furthermore, as such a pure gift, the gift of their death is a gift that the dead give us altogether without any forethought or intention on their part, just by dying.  In that sense, their bestowing of their gift upon us who are still living is involuntary.

Correlatively, the reception of such a gift is no less involuntary.  One receives it just by being born at all.  It is for the very reason that both the giving and the receiving are involuntary, however, that the debt incurred by the living toward the dead for the pure gift of their death is in-finite (literally un-ending) and un-payable.  The debt is infinite and un-payable because the gift by the involuntary receiving of which we are placed in debt to the dead, is always without cause, always “in vain” in the sense Badiou explicates.

All death is in vain, and no one dies except in vain.   There is no point or purpose served by death.  It is non-purposive, a-telic—just like life itself, which, as Nietzsche observes, neither has nor lacks a meaning.

Accordingly, if it is the dead whom we are remembering and not some idol we are substituting for the dead themselves, we must keep in mind that their deaths were indeed in vain.   Any attempt to give “meaning” to their deaths, to assure that they will “not have died in vain,” in fact robs the dead of their very death.  To pretend to give death a purpose, a point or justification, is one sure way precisely to fail to honor the dead, to dishonor and even to blaspheme against them.

In so doing, in fact, one accrues, with or without intention, the second-order (“moral”) guilt of acting contrary to one’s duty (which includes simply not doing it at all)—here, one’s duty to the dead.  One reduces the dying of the dead (e.g., the millions killed by the Nazis) to no more than a means to achieve some end (e.g., the founding of the state of Israel) external to, and imposed upon, them.

Our Debt to the Dead #3: What We Owe

The post below continues my series with the draft of a chapter for a planned book on philosophy and trauma, a chapter on the idea of a debt the living owe the dead.  In my immediately preceding post, I discussed Heidegger’s analysis of debt and guilt, which is where I pick up below.

* * * * *

If we are, as Heidegger argues, guilty or indebted with what we might, following his own terminology, call an ontological guilt or indebtedness, insofar as we are from birth accountable for a debt incurred without any choice on our part, then no payment at all, not even an infinite one, could ever possibly discharge our debt.  No payment is equal to what we owe.  Our debt is in principle un-dischargeable.  It can never be cancelled, no matter what we do.  The debt we owe for our very being is one that could not be discharged or cancelled even by our voluntarily ceasing to be—by taking our own life in suicide, for instance.  There may be some circumstances in which, as Jean Améry argued, the choice to commit suicide has good and sufficient grounds and is, therefore, a thoroughly rational choice under those circumstances, to be respected as such.  However, the idea that one could pay one’s debt for one’s very being by committing such suicide is not tenable.  If anything, a suicide committed on the basis of the inescapability of one’s ontological indebtedness would just incur further debt, adding more charges against one, in effect, in much the same way as leaving town and changing one’s identity to avoid making payments on a bank loan only increases one’s liability.

Whatever one’s belief or lack of belief about such matters as God and sin, at least one debt that all of us do indeed incur by being born at all is our debt to the dead.  For one thing, we are all first, last, and always in debt to the dead—as paradoxical as it may sound–for their very dying:  To put the point bluntly, if the dead had not died, then there’d be no place for us among the living.  By dying, the dead make room for us, as we in turn will make room for others in our own deaths.

Thus, we owe our very lives and any chance to live them to the dead, who, by their dying, make room for us to be born into life.  Life itself is indebtedness to the dead for the gift of life opened to us by their dying.  We are all born of the dying of the dead, and even giving birth is itself a matter of just such dying, that the newborn may be.  It is the giving up of one’s claim over one’s own life, so that life may come forth in the other, the one being born.  By dying, the dead give the gift of life to the living, bearing them to their births.

Such a link between bearing a child and dying oneself has often enough been noted.  What has perhaps been noticed less often is that giving life to a child is also giving the same child over to death, to dying.  As an old proverb says, as soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.  That is true not just or even mainly in the trivial sense that at any moment after birth one may suddenly die, killed by such accidents as earthquakes, malevolent acts of others, or congenital defects of one’s own.  The truth in the proverb that as soon as we are born we are old enough to die is that we are all born dying:  Living itself is “unto death” in a strong sense.  Giving birth to a child is setting that child free to die, letting the child go, releasing it into dying.  The dead, in dying, give us the gift of life, which is to say the gift that enables us to die ourselves:  In dying, the dead give us not just “the gift of life,” but also and inseparably “the gift of death,” to use the title of one of Jacques Derrida’s works.    For that gift of death, a gift without which we could receive no other gifts at all (nor offer any, for that matter) we owe a debt to the dead.

Above all what we owe the dead for that gift—of life, of death, of life unto death–is no more and no less than to accept the gift they have given us.  To accept the gift of death from the dead, however, is just to live unto death and into it ourselves, as the dead have done before us.  In turn, to do that—to accept the gift of death from the dead by dying oneself—is to pass on the gift of death, by clearing space for others, “the next generation,” to come forth, that they too may receive the same gift.  By not clinging to life, but letting it go, we make room for others to be born and life to go on–go on, namely, in the living, which is always unto death.

The dead as such, however, are anonymous.  Dying is entering into such anonymity.  It is folly, therefore, to think that we pay our debt to the dead by remembering them by name.  It is much more nearly the reverse:  We pay our debt to the dead by letting them go forth into death, as into just such anonymity.  It is in, and only in, anonymity that the dead are finally and truly let be dead.  Anything short of that, however, and we are refusing the very gift we owe to the dead, the very gift of life itself; we are throwing that gift back in the face of the giver, which is the very definition of ingratitude.

“How can one escape what never sets?” asks Heraclitus rhetorically in one of his fragments.   Yet in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (Fordham, 2002) Jean-Louis Chrétien teaches the paradox that only what can never be remembered is truly unforgettable.  All its possible positive benefits for those who are still alive set aside, the endeavor to remember the dead by reading their names–as is done on the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, at the site where the World Trade Center once stood, for example–is not what the living must do, to give the dead their due.  Insofar as such endeavors to cling to the memory of the individual dead actually drag the dead out of the anonymity within which death itself encloses them, those endeavors just make a fetish of the dead.  To that degree, they refuse to honor the dead in their very being dead, and even begin to cross over into blasphemy against them.

Hope to be remembered individually and by name by future generations is hope in a sham-immortality.  As the author of Ecclesiates knew, all that is vanity.  Not only will all the survivors with all their memories of all their dead loved ones eventually vanish themselves in turn, but even while those survivors still live and still keep their memories of all their dead loved ones brightly burnished, the images so kept do not reveal but mask what they represent.  A form of idolatry is involved, whereby the images of the dead come to replace the dead themselves in the recollections of the still living.  The dead are thus denied their death, disrespected in their anonymous community in death.

In his classic literary biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellman at one point addresses the lines I used as the epigraph for this chapter, the last lines from “The Dead,” Joyce’s great closing story in Dubliners.  Ellman argues that the Joycean snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” must not be taken, as not a few have taken it, to be a symbol for death itself.  Ellman maintains that such an understanding would involve Joyce in a very un-Joycean tautology, the tautology of death descending on the dead.  Yet I would maintain, pace Ellman, that the snow of those lines is precisely death, and that it is just the fall of death upon both the living and the dead that brings both together into a single, universal community, the only community in which there is no “respecting of persons,” because in that community all are equal–equal, namely and only, in their complete anonymity:  All the living and all the dead are all alike alone together before death.

Only when the names of the dead are at last forgotten, are the dead themselves—all the anonymous dead alike–allowed at last fully to be themselves remembered, and no longer covered over by their very names and by our own needy memories of them.  As only the monk who no longer knows he is praying is truly praying, according to the desert anchorites of the early centuries of Christianity, so are the dead truly worshipped only when the worshiper no longer knows just whom she is worshiping.

Some of the most pointed examples of experiencing the impossibility of repaying the debt that the living owe to the dead can be found among survivors of such horrible traumatic events as the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, or the Nazi extermination of the Jews.  Robert Jay Lifton, who worked with survivors of both cataclysms, makes a point of how both Hiroshima survivors and Auschwitz survivors commonly regard their survival as mandating them to bear witness to those who did not so survive.  They experience themselves as guilty before those who died in the bombing or in the camps.  Furthermore, no matter how often and for how long the survivors bear such witness, telling others about what happened to those who did not survive, the survivors never experience it as enough.   They never experience themselves as acquitted of the duty to go on bearing witness.  As they experience it themselves, the debt of survivors to those who did not survive can never be repaid.

Not just for survivors of Hiroshima or Auschwitz, however but also for us all as “survivors”–those who are still alive in the face of all the dead–our debt to the dead is un-payable.  For that very reason, any attempt to pay it accrues a sort of second order guilt, the guilt that comes from doing harm to another.  We harm the dead in stripping them of their rest in the anonymity of death, insisting on calling them back from the grave by name, summoning them by our invocations, to serve as instruments for our own purposes.   To honor them and acknowledge our debt is to refuse any longer so to abuse them.  It is, instead, to let them be dead.

It is not by reciting the names of the dead at memorial occasions, or printing their pictures as “portraits of glory” in our newspapers, that we assume our debt to them and acknowledge our guilt before them.  Rather, we can assume that debt and acknowledge that guilt only by what amounts to an opposite sort of movement, one in which we no longer try to detain the dead and keep them with us, but instead allow them to depart from us, and go forth into the holy anonymity of the grave.

Our Debt to the Dead #2: Heidegger’s Guilt

Having discussed influential psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of a positive, healthy, morally mature sense of having a “debt to the dead” in my preceding post, in today’s post I discuss Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt in Being and Time.

* * * * *

In Being and Time Heidegger argues that “being guilty” (Schuldigsein) is a primordial existential determination of what he calls Dasein, his name for the human being, which is commonly left in the German even in English translations of his work.  That is, far from guilt being a condition one acquires only on occasion, by acting contrary to how one “should” act, being guilty belongs, by his analysis, to the very being of a human being, the being of “being-there” or Dasein (da: there; and sein: to be). According to him, it is only because Dasein always already is guilty, that it is even possible for it to become “guilty” in the derivative sense of having committed some violation of some moral or social law or rule—become guilty, in short, through failure to do one’s “duty,” to do what one “should” or “ought to” do.

It is interesting to note that, like Lifton, Heidegger supports his analysis in part by referring to the etymology of the word guilt (Schuld, in German).  The root of that term means “to owe,” “to be owing to. ”  In that sense, then, it means precisely to be in debt—namely, in debt to whatever or whomever one owes whatever it is that one owes.

In the everyday—but, for Heidegger, derivative–usage of the term ‘guilt,’ one acquires guilt by being the cause or agent of a violation of duty, broadly conceived.   So understood, being guilty is not at all definitive for being human at all.  Rather, it is an occasional state or condition acquired through specific acts (including failures to act) of a certain sort.  The “debt” connected to guilt is a debt accrued by such actions, and is, therefore, at least in principle something that could be “paid off” by some sort of payment, whether in pounds sterling or in pounds of flesh.

Such everyday usage clearly still accords well enough with the original, etymological meaning of the term ‘debt.’  In effect, contemporary usage just limits the notion of being in debt, of owing something, to cases in which the debt at issue is incurred by one’s own specific choices and actions, or at least to debts capable of being paid off in one fashion or another.  So, to give an example relevant to my concerns in this chapter, just such an understanding of debt would be in play in any account of so called “ancestor worship” that treated such worship as an attempt to keep the spirits of ancestors well disposed toward oneself or one’s society by making them payments in the way of sacrifices of various sorts, from firstborn children to fumes of incense or ejaculatory prayers.

In contrast, both Heidegger’s and Lifton’s analyses of guilt suggest a very different account of the nature of debt as such–and, accordingly, a very different account of what is at issue in supposed ancestor worship.  Certainly by Heidegger’s analysis–and, if I am right, also by Lifton’s–guilt, precisely as indebtedness, is not a condition acquired after the fact as a consequence of making certain choices or acting in certain ways.  Rather, it is part and parcel of being human, as such:  To be a human being is to be guilty, indebted, before and apart from any specific choices one might make or fail to make, or actions one might perform or fail to perform.

It follows, as well, that such guilt or indebtedness can never, in principle, be “paid off.”  Insofar as it defines the very being of the human being as such, even the payment of one’s own life could never write “paid” over the debt at issue.  No conceivable payment, no matter how large or difficult to make, could ever close one’s account and put one in good standing, as it were.

It is perhaps worthwhile to take a few moments to contrast the notion of guilt and debt that emerges in Lifton and Heidegger with another analysis of guilt with which it might seem to be similar:  the famous/infamous analysis of human guilt and indebtedness to God first fully articulated by St. Anselm in the 11^th century, and still very much alive today within large parts both of Catholicism and of evangelical Protestantism—an idea that finds popular expression billboards and bumper stickers that proclaim “Christ died for your sins.”   In line with such an idea, the supposed “fall” of humanity through Adam, the fall from grace by and into sin, is something by which human beings acquire an “infinite” debt to God.  By the principle that full payment must be equivalent to what is owed, however, an infinite debt could only be paid off with an infinite payment, which is, in turn, a payment that only a being that was itself infinite could ever possibly pay.  Accordingly, in order to pay the infinite debt incurred by sin, and thus liberate humanity from the burden of an otherwise un-relievable burden, it was necessary for the infinite God to become incarnate in Jesus and then to take on, as a sort of infinite scapegoat, all the infinite burden of sin, in order that, in His death on the cross, he could then pay Himself the infinite “ransom” demanded to liberate humanity from captivity in its own sin, and to reconcile it to Himself.

However, in contrast, Lifton’s and Heidegger’s analyses suggest, as I read them, that the debt the living owe the dead is one that even an infinite God could never pay.  To capture what is at issue, we might say that the debt in question is infinite in the sense of unending, taken strictly.  That is, it is in-finite in the sense of being literally without end–alternatively worded, it is ever ongoing.   To put the point paradoxically, even if God were to pay himself an infinite payment (as “ransom”) for the infinite debt of human sinfulness, humanity would still not be free of debt.  It would still not receive any “get out of jail” card in the game of divine monopoly.  Humanity’s debt to God would still be infinite, even after such an infinite payment.  It would just keep going on.  The debt would just keep “carrying over,” and the “balance due” would remain infinite.

* * *

It may be helpful at this point to note that, more than twenty years after the publication of Being and Time, in what was eventually published under the title of  “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger explicitly connected the notion of “indebtedness” (Schulden) to the ancient philosophical doctrine of four-fold causation.  Indeed, he uses the very term Schuld (debt/guilt) to capture what, according to him, is at stake in the ancient Greek notion of “aitia,” normally translated as “cause.”   He says, in short, that what the Greeks meant by aitia was precisely that to which whatever was at issue was, in effect, owing.

In colloquial English, we often use ‘owing to’ in the way Heidegger has in mind.  For example, in the fall of 2008, after a summer of record gas prices, many families across the United States might well have said that “owing to the price of gas” they had not taken any long summer vacation trips.  Furthermore, though present usage of the term ‘cause’ is much more restricted than was the case for ancient Greek usage of the term aitia, it still does not sound especially strange to say that the cost of gas “caused” the families at issue to stay home.  If asked why they took no trips, such families might well say that it was “because” of the cost of gas:  be-cause of the price of gasoline–that is, by cause of it—they remained at home.

In that broad sense of the term, whereby a cause of an occurrence is anything that contributes to answering the question of “why” it happened, the causes of a given occurrence are the factors owing to which it occurred.  The event owes its very occurrence to those factors, and is in that sense indebted to them.

An occurrence solely as such, however, is not itself “accountable” in its indebtedness—accountable “for” itself “to” the factors to which it is indebted.  In contrast, it is not merely as being indebted—in the sense of “being owing to,” as just addressed, in which “being indebted” is characteristic of anything whatever—but also as being accountable for their debts to their “debtors” that human beings are guilty.

Heidegger expresses this by saying that Dasein not only “is” a “null basis” of itself, but also itself “has to be” that null basis—that is, it “has” that null basis “to be,” in accordance with Heidegger’s general formulation to the effect that Dasein never simply “is” whatever it is, but always has being whatever it is “as an issue,” or “at issue,” for itself, and in that sense always “has its being [whatever it “is”] to be.”  That is what Heidegger in Being and Time labels the “existence” (“ek-sistence”:  literally, standing out from itself) of Dasein.

Consequently, when he eventually gets around to discussing guilt, Heidegger offers a definition whereby guilt is:  “having to be the null basis of a nullity.”  For my purposes here–and based on Heidegger’s own discussion of guilt or debt (Schuld), indebtedness (being-in-debt, or being-guilty:  Schuldig-sein), and debts (Schulden )–being guilty can be taken to mean not merely being indebted or owing to something or someone,  but in addition to be accountable for the debt at issue.  In that sense, the debt at issue is a debt that lies at the very heart of the being of the person, prior to—and first making possible at all—the incurring of any debt or indebtedness in the more limited sense, where it is only through actions or failures to act that one can accrue guilt.  Thus, even before and apart from any actions we might take or fail to take, we are not only always in debt but also always accountable for it.  As such, we always must and always do–one way or another, like it or not–take up that debt, assuming it, as it were.

In our accountability for our always inescapable indebtedness, to give an accounting is always part of our standing debt:  We always  “owe an accounting” of our debt to—we are “accountable” to–whatever or whomever we are “owing” in the first place.  Thus, first and above all one is accountable for any given debt to whomever or whatever one owes whatever it is that one owes—to whomever or whatever gave it to one in the first place:  one’s “debtor” or “creditor” for the debt in question.  Thus, for example, in one line of one old version of the Christian prayer to “Our Father,” one prays to God the Father explicitly as to just such a creditor, asking that God “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  More mundanely, the bank that carries the mortgage on my home is my creditor for the sum of money involved (plus interest, of course); and I am a debtor in relation to them for that sum.

It is at least conceivable, however unlikely, that the bank holding the mortgage on my home might at some time forgive me that particular debt.  If we are to believe many of the “believers” among us, then God does indeed forgive us the debts to Him we incur by “sin”—though there is disagreement among such believers about whether God must first be asked to forgive us the debt of our sins, as there is about the details required for the transaction.  For example, there is disagreement among Christians about whether the Incarnation and Passion of Christ was the price that God had to pay Himself to “ransom” us from His own clutches, as Saint Anselm says.

To stay for a moment with that same Christian example, it remains a matter of debate among Christians whether the indebtedness at issue, namely, the indebtedness incurred by “sin,” is so incurred by our specific, chosen actions and failures to act, or whether it is part and parcel of our being born in the first place.  Whatever may be the resolution of that dispute among Christians, if there is any final resolution possible, the mere fact that there is such dispute points to an issue concerning guilt and debt that has more than Christian significance.  That is the issue of how to address the indebtedness revealed by the preceding analysis, informed by Lifton’s and Heidegger’s works.  How are we to address that indebtedness incurred by the very fact that we are born at all, an inescapable indebtedness which is implicated in our very being, before and apart from any indebtedness of a more limited sort that one might incur by one’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to purchase a home on credit, or the act of stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree (as Augustine famously did)?

I will discuss that question in the next section of this chapter.

Our Debt to the Dead #1: Robert J. Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt (Beginning a New Chapter and Closing, Belatedly and with Apologies, an Old One)

Today I begin posting the draft of a new chapter–the third so far–for what I plan to be eventually a book on trauma and philosophy.  This chapter has the tentative title of “Our Debt to the Dead.”

I also want to apologize to readers, for an unintentional omission in a recent series of posts.  Only while preparing the post for today did I realize that I had somehow never finished posting what should have been the penultimate post of the series I devoted to the first of the three chapters just mentioned.  I have now at last posted that entry, which can be found at this blog-site under the title “Responding to Trauma #7:  Rebecca Solnit and Building Paradise in Hell, Continued,”  published just yesterday (October 22).  Interested readers might want to go back and begin with the post “Responding to Trauma #6,” for the start of my discussion of Solnit’s recently published book A Paradise Built in Hell.

What follows below is the opening of my draft for the new chapter, on what we owe the dead.

* * * * *

Our Debt to the Dead

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” – James Joyce, Dubliners

Robert Jay Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt

“One kind of anxiety is a sense of guilt,” writes influential psychologist Robert Jay Lifton to begin an analysis of guilt in Broken Connections:  Death and Life Continuity e (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1979, page 132).   What Lifton says about guilt is in the context of his decades-long research on survivors of such public, historically significant traumas as the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima at the end of World War II or of the American debacle in Viet Nam a few decades later.  With regard to the latter, Lifton played a crucial role in the development of the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and in eventually gaining official recognition of PTSD as a distinct diagnostic category, signaled by its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980.

“Guilt feelings,” he goes on to observe, “like other forms of anxiety, are associated with psychological pain and many kinds of psychopathology.”  Lifton’s own concern with guilt, however, is not so much with pathological manifestations of it as it is with guilt’s healthy forms.  Thus, immediately after noting the connection between guilt and psychopathology, he writes that “guilt can also serve as a signal that the integrity of the organism, or moral integrity, is threatened.”  Thus, he concludes:  “It follows that the capacity for guilt is necessary and useful on the one hand, and a potential source of severe psychological harm on the other.”

Significantly, when Lifton turns to the topic of what has commonly come to be known as “survivor guilt,” that is, the guilt that survivors of a trauma that strikes others as well as themselves often experience toward those who did not survive, he does not relegate such guilt, as one might expect, to the second camp, that of unhealthy manifestations of guilt.  That is, he does not treat survivor guilt as a subset of pathological guilt, as tends to occur in contemporary popular psychological accounts of the phenomenon, where feeling guilt for surviving a traumatic event is typically treated as no more than a malady to be overcome, or at best a stage of the healing process–at any rate not as something that characterizes mature psychological health itself.

However, the contrary idea, that survivor guilt as such does indeed belong to mature psychological health, is just what Lifton’s analysis ultimately suggests.  Instead of relegating survivor guilt to the pathological side of phenomena of guilt, Lifton draws the distinction between the healthy and the pathological within survivor guilt itself.  Thus, while not at all denying that survivor guilt can and often does indicate an underlying psychopathology, Lifton also insists that it can sometimes indicate psychological—and moral—vitality and health.

As he presents it inThe Broken Connection, it is precisely his own earlier work with cases of guilt in survivors of the atom bomb explosion over Hiroshima at the end of World War II, as well as his work two to three decades later with American veterans of the war in Vietnam, which gives Lifton his guiding clues for characterizing not just survivor guilt, but even guilt in general.  In effect, he de-pathologizes survivor guilt by placing it in the perspective of the larger view of guilt he derives from his earlier work with survivors.

The crucial step in Lifton’s analysis is to focus upon survivor guilt in terms of the inexpugnable sense of a debt to the dead that survivors commonly experience.    In turn, against the not uncommon tendency to treat the sense of debt toward the dead as itself mere evidence of immature or superstitious belief, he articulates the position that, as he puts it at the end of the chapter on guilt in The Broken Connection (page 146), “[i]ndividuation itself demands that the young organism…indeed develop the capacity for a debt to the dead…”

Two pages earlier (144), Lifton is careful to note:  “The image of a debt to the dead conveys the idea of something one owes, a duty, an obligation, a matter in which there is some form of accountability.”  That last word, ‘accountability,’ provides the key for understanding Lifton’s entire analysis, in my judgment.  For him, the notion of debt is not to be read as a reduction of the idea of moral accountability or responsibility to some sort of economic exchange, as it is widely taken to be, especially in “deconstructive” accounts.  Rather than arguing that the idea of a debt to the dead involves a sort of economicization of the idea of guilt, as occurs in such accounts, Lifton, as I read him, suggests that what is really in play is a de-economicization of the idea of debt, in which the very notion of economic debt gets read back into the broader moral context of accountability or responsibility.

What is more, I do not think it does injustice to Lifton’s thought to remark that the tendency of his analysis is precisely to divorce the notion of debt, specifically of debt to the dead, from any attempt to treat such debt as something that could ever even potentially be “discharged.”  That is, debt to the dead in the sense at issue for him as I read him is nothing that could ever possibly be “paid off,” leaving the living no longer indebted, and thereby freeing them to go on about their business, content in the good conscience of having repaid their debts to, and squared their accounts with, the dead.

Rather, the sense of debt to the dead to which Lifton’s analysis points is a debt that is un-payable in principle.  It is a debt that can never be discharged and which, more importantly, is misunderstood as soon as it is treated in terms of any possibility of paying it off.  Indeed, I would argue that it is not pushing things too far to say that such “misunderstanding” is an all too motivated, self-serving one for those who entertain it:  The attempt to reduce one’s debt to the dead to something that might somehow someday be paid off, is actually the crucial attempt to shirk that very debt, to renege on it–in short, to cheat the dead of what one owes them.

However, the dead are remorseless, as it were.  They never forgive the debt the living owe them.  Nor do they ever “write off their losses.”  Instead, they stubbornly insist on asserting their claim on the living.   The dead are inexorable creditors.

By Lifton’s analysis the morally mature, healthy individual is, then, not someone who has somehow managed to pay her debt to the dead.  Rather, even to think in terms that would allow one to make sense of the notion of ever writing “paid” to the living’s debt to the dead would be a reliable sign of moral immaturity.  In contrast, the morally mature and healthy individual would be someone who holds tightly to the knowledge that her debt to the dead can never be discharged, never be paid or made good.  It is a debt, instead, that must be constantly borne.

Today, such a view seems completely counter-intuitive.  It runs head on against some currently basic notions concerning debts, indebtedness, and the payment of debts.  So deeply has the common contemporary understanding economicized the notion of debt that the very idea of the sort of debt Lifton’s analysis suggests we owe the dead–a debt the sum of which cannot be calculated and for which no balancing of accounts would ever be possible—such a notion seems to be sheer non-sense, a violation of the very meaning of the term ‘debt.’  A debt that could never even conceivably be paid, with however large a sum of payments, seems void of all sense, given current dominant understandings.

It also runs counter to the still widespread idea of the foolishness, the childishness–the “primitive” nature–of all “ancestor worship” and “ancestor religion.”  Contrary to such derogation of ancestor worship, if Lifton is right in the general direction of his thinking about debts to the dead, then ancestor worship could well bear witness to the good and mature moral sense of those who practiced it, rather than to their moral immaturity.

But what sort of a bizarre debt would it be, that could never in principle be paid off, and that is owed to those no longer even living?  Could it be anything more than a poor wordplay to talk of such a wholly non-indemnifiable debt?

In my judgment, Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt and debt in Being and Time can help to answer that question, as I will discuss in the next section of this chapter.

Responding to Trauma #7: Rebecca Solnit on Building Paradise in Hell, Continued

NOTE to my readers on October 22, 2009.  The post below should have gone up a month ago, on September 28, as the seventh in a series on “Responding to Trauma,” and as the continuation of a discussion I began in my post published September 25 of Rebecca Solnit’s most recent book.  Somehow, I never managed to publish it at the time, and did not realize my error until today, a month late.  So I am posting it now, with my apologies.

* * *

Today’s post concludes my discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s recent book A Paradise Built in Hell.  It is part of what I hope will eventually be a book chapter entitled “Truth and Trauma.”  My preceding post ended with some reflections on a chapter of her book in which Solnit considers what the zapatista movement of southeastern Mexico can teach us about “disaster communities,” which she says is the subject of her book.  Below, I pick up my discussion at that point.

* * * * *

The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

At the end of her next chapter, devoted to the disaster communities of mutual aid that formed in New York City after the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Solnit quotes Astra Taylor, whom she describes (page 193) as “a tall young woman from Georgia working at a left-wing publishing house in TriBeCa” on that day, who after the attacks “went out into the street with hundreds of others to watch the extraordinary spectacle not so far away,” and ended up being caught up in the mass exodus of New Yorkers leaving the city on foot.  Taylor, after remarking (quoted on page 194 in Solnit) that “[t]he experience on television was so different than the experience on the street,” goes on (with my emphasis added):

I felt connected to the people on the street and I felt impressed by them.  I also felt that reality is not what I thought it was, I still have a lot to learn.  The reality that people would do this, commit this act of terrorism but also the reality that people in the street would help you and that you would help.  Work—I really hate work—and it gets in the way so much:  we’re rushing to work and we’re at work and rushing from work.  We didn’t go to work for a few days, and you had all this time to talk to people and talk to your family.

“Taylor had a lot of family on hand,” Solnit adds:  ”two of her three younger siblings were with her in her warehouse in Brooklyn.  Her wheelchair-bound younger sister wasn’t threatened by the attacks either.  She was terrified that her parents would make her come back home because of them, and she’d lose her newfound liberty.  She didn’t, and the usually reclusive Taylor put on an exhibition for the neighborhood in their home.  Taylor summed up Brooklyn that week as an anarchist’s paradise, a somber carnival:  ’No one went to work and everyone talked to strangers.’ ”

A bit later (on pages 221-222) Solnit expresses some chagrin about the subsequent history of the American response to 9/11:  ”It’s possible to imagine a reality that diverged from September 11 onward, a reality in which the first thing affirmed was the unconquerable vitality of civil society, the strength of bonds of affection against violence, of open public life against the stealth and arrogance of the attack.  (These were all affirmed informally, in practice, but not institutionally, and they constituted a victory of sorts, a refusal to be cowed, a coming together, and a demonstration of what is in many ways the opposite of terrorism.)”

But isn’t the very granting of “reality” to the institutions of power that were so dissipated on 9/11 itself—those very institutions that Taylor sums up eloquently and accurately with the four-letter word work—exactly to accept the illusion on which such power feeds, and on which it must always feed to maintain itself?

“From that point on,” continues Solnit in the passage at issue,

the people yearning to sacrifice might have been asked to actually make sweeping changes that would make a society more independent of Mideast oil and the snake pit of politics that goes with it, reawakened to its own global role and its local desires for membership, purpose, dignity, and a deeper safety that came not from weapons but from a different role in the world and at home.  That is to say, the resourcefulness and improvisation that mattered in those hours could have been extended indefinitely; we could have become a disaster society in the best sense.

That we did become just that, or, better, that we always are just that—just such a “disaster society in the best sense”—is, it seems to me, what her whole earlier discussion of Marcos and the zapatista’s, as well as Solnit’s own immediately preceding discussion of the testimony of Taylor and other New Yorkers on 9/11 itself, helps make clear.  Furthermore, isn’t her regret over supposedly lost opportunities a forgetting of Marcos’s zapatista lesson that the “the means are the end,” which is also, I would argue, the lesson of “fiesta and carnival” in general?

Earlier in her discussion of 9/11 (page 189) Solnit quotes this from an email account of that day by a survivor who “escaped with several coworkers from the eighty-seventh floor of the north tower”:  “ ‘They [who made the attacks] failed in terrorizing us.  We were calm.  If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves.  If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite.  This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States.  The very moment the first plane was hijacked, democracy won.’ ”

Solnit’s own accounts of various other disasters in places other than the United States make it clear that if this survivor’s insight holds, it holds not just for that one place, nor for any one political system.  Rather, if the insight holds at all, it does so as one of universal applicability, pointing to the inevitable failure of all acts of what this survivor, following the general usage of that day and still this one, calls “terrorism.”  All such attacks are doomed to fail because they rest on an illusion, one dispelled immediately by the very response they first call up, precisely from those being attacked.

However, cannot the same insight finally—indeed, above all—be applied to the very thing the attackers at issue on 9/11 thought they were attacking:  that same United States that the survivor just cited regards (falsely, I am saying) as especially immunized against such attacks, or at least against them succeeding?  The so called terrorists themselves could say the same thing to and about themselves that the survivor Solnit quotes says about 9/11:  “The Great Satan (that is, the United States) failed in terrorizing (or demoralizing, or annihilating, or destroying, or the like) us.  We were calm.  If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves.  If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite.  This is the ultimate failure of the United States.  The very moment the first Muslim was degraded (or the first Palestinian uprooted, the first African enslaved, or whatever), Islam (or Liberation, or ‘the beloved community’ of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement, to which Solnit devotes a good discussion) won.”

That is the important, deep truth of the 9/11 survivor’s remark:  Poor Satan (whatever or whomever that may functionally turn out to be for any given situation, whether it be “the United States,” “terrorists,” “demon rum,” or some other thing or person)!  No matter how hard the poor devil tries to do evil, good comes out of it!  No sooner does the devil start to do his dirtiest, than everything is swept bright and clean again, even brighter and cleaner than before.

The survivor of 9/11 quoted above, as well as countless other survivors, not just of 9/11 but of countless other disasters, including those Solnit studies and as her own analyses make clear, did not just believe that to be so, or just hope that it might be.  Rather, they directly experienced its being so, just as Marcos and the Zapatistas did in the uprising of 1994 and their other “actions,” when, as Marcos put it, they experienced that the means were the end.

Later in her book, after not only the remarks just discussed concerning 9/11 but also, therefore, after her analysis of the Zapatistas, Solnit remarks that she “had long wondered whether there was a society so rich in a sense of belonging and purpose that disaster could bring nothing to it”—bring nothing by way of an opportunity for the celebration of life and one another in what she calls disaster communities.  That would have to be “a society where there was no alienation and isolation to undo.”  She makes that remark in one of her chapters devoted to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and adds that she’d always thought she might find such a society “in Mexico or a traditional community.”  At any rate, she writes, “I found a little of that in New Orleans.”

She returns to that theme in the concluding chapter of her book, in terms of the broad lessons her study of disasters and disaster communities has taught her:  ”Who are you?  Who are we?  The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning.  It also suggest that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change.  They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative.”

As her preceding studies in the book have made clear, what above all determines which outcome a given disaster will have—the destructive one, or the creative one—is whether it is “civil society” or “elite panic” that wins the day.  Thus, she continues the passage just cited as follows:  ”Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances [of disaster]; they are often what fails in such crises.  Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges.  Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis.”

Yet isn’t it really exactly this same thing, the “dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions,” that must be always at work beneath surface appearances to let “hierarchies and institutions”—those very hierarchies and institutions whereby the elite maintain their status and power—function in the first place?  Solnit’s own discussions of the responses to disaster have surely made it clear that it is nothing other than the prospect that the people will suddenly come to realize that very point–when they find themselves in the carnival atmosphere of a mutual aid community that responsively forms after a disaster—that puts the elite into such a panic in the first place.

Thus, Solnit herself continues the passage cited above, after observing that it is only the “dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions” that can address such major public disasters as she examines, by writing:  “One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways:  it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild,” thereby making manifest the irrelevancy of the powers that be, with all their “hierarchies and institutions,” and who do not even show up to help in such emergencies, phantoms that they are and are thereby shown to be, the illusion of their power dispelled in the process.  Indeed, by her own analysis that is not just “one” reason, but is, rather, the reason, at least in the sense of the most important and the sufficient reason, for “elite panic” at the prospect of disaster or its aftermath.  As Solnit herself goes on to write, such devolution of power upon the people after a disaster “demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making.”  What is more, I would say, it demonstrates that exactly such a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making has been operative all along, giving the only substance they can have to the phantoms whereby the elite appear to themselves and the people as necessary, or even merely relevant.

“Citizens themselves,” notes Solnit as she continues, “in these moments [of response to disaster] constitute the government—the acting decision making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered.”  However, that is so not only at moments of disaster or crisis, but also in moments of calm and “business as usual.”   At all times any actual government, as any hierarchy or institution at all, is sustained only insofar as all the anonymous individuals that constitute “the people” continually re-enact them—or, as Thomas Mann, or certainly as literary theorist and Jewish and German studies scholar Erich Santner, in his Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), would say, re-cite them, as though they did indeed have some sort of authority of their own.  In that crucial sense, the “democracy” Solnit mentions is far from rarely delivered, nor need its delivery even be promised, since it is always already given, whenever any government at all is.

So is the “revolution” Solnit goes on to mention in her next sentence already there, for those who but wake from dreaming dreams of—and even more for—power:  “Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.”  In a certain, crucial sense, it has.

We might say that community and revolution and all that goes with them–the “purposefulness, meaning, involvement” that Solnit lists on the next page (306), along with “the immersion in service and survival, and . . . an affection that is not private and personal but civic:  the love of strangers for each other, of a citizen for his or her city, of belonging to a greater whole, of doing the work that matters”—are always there and active, even dominantly so, as latent, a word she uses in such a context herself toward the end of page 305.  What disaster offers is the opportunity for that latency to become patent, as it does whenever one of Solnit’s “disaster communities” forms in disaster’s aftermath.

* * *

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #9: Resistance and the Refusal of Meaning, Concluded

In my last post, I began a discussion of philosopher and rape survivor Susan J. Brison’s book Aftermath.  What I am posting below completes that discussion, as it completes my draft of the chapter on “Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma.”  Below, I begin by reproducing the passage from Brison’s book that I cited at the very end of my preceding post, to give context to what follows.

* * * * *

. . . many trauma survivors who  endured much worse than I did, and for much  longer, found, often years later, that it was impossible to go on.  It is not a moral failing to leave a world that has become morally unacceptable.  I wonder how some can ask, of battered women, ‘Why didn’t they leave?’ while saying, of those driven to suicide by brutal and inescapable aftermath of trauma, ‘Why didn’t they stay?’  Améry wrote, ‘Whoever was tortured, stays tortured’ and this may explain why he, [Primo] Levi, and [Paul] Celan and other Holocaust survivors took their own lives decades after their (physical) torture ended, as if such an explanation were needed.

Only considerably later, near the end of the book, do we learn that the reference to suicide in the passage just quoted is not only thematically important for Brison’s discussion of recovery from trauma.  It is also biographically important for Brison herself, as she reveals by telling the reader that it was her own brother’s death by suicide one day before Christmas in 1995 that (page 115) “made [her] rethink the importance of regaining control in recovering from trauma.”

Up to that point, her experience of her rape and its aftermath had led her to think of recovery from trauma as entailing regaining a sense of control, especially by constructing a narrative in which the trauma becomes integrated into the ongoing life-story of the trauma survivor, in a process involving seeking out and being heard by empathic listeners.  In succeeding in constructing and sharing such a narrative, the trauma survivor is able to “make sense” of the traumatic experience.  However, her brother’s suicide five years after she was raped—and it is well worth noting explicitly here that by experiencing her brother’s suicide Brison herself survives yet another trauma, on top of the one she suffered five years earlier when she was raped and beaten—occasions her rethinking of the whole matter yet again.

“Maybe,” she writes (still on page 115) concerning the results of her rethinking,  “the point is to learn how to relinquish control” (emphasis added) rather than somehow to regain it.  She then uses the Freudian distinction between “acting out” an earlier trauma in one’s ongoing behavior, as if one were trying at last to “get it right,” in effect, and “working through” the trauma.   Learning to relinquish control, she comes to think after her brother’s suicide, requires that we “learn by going where we need to go, to replace the clenched, repetitive acting out with the generativity of working through.”  Compulsive repetition, “although [itself] uncontrollable,” as she notes, “is, paradoxically, obsessed with control, with the soothing, numbing safety of the familiar,” and can go so far as to “instill the dangerous, even deadly, illusion of invincibility.”  In contrast, the process of working through “is inventive, open to surprise, driven to improvisation,” and “ can provide the foundation of trust on which new life can be built, the steady bass continuo that liberates the other parts to improvise without fear.”

With these remarks toward the end of her book, Brison picks up and deepens a useful distinction she has earlier introduced between what she calls “living to tell,” on the one hand, and “telling to live,” on the other.  Those who survive trauma, as Brison herself survived being raped and beaten, often report that it was the felt need to survive the ordeal in order that they could subsequently bear witness to what they had gone through.  For them, they had to live through the ordeal in order to tell about it later, eventually constructing a coherent trauma narrative and finding empathic listeners to hear that narrative, as has already been discussed.

However, Brison eventually discerns—no doubt as the result, given what she reveals to the reader only later, of the rethinking her brother’s suicide occasioned for her–that there are definite limits to the healing potential of this process of living to tell, and that in order to continue to recover beyond those limits one must switch to the very different process of telling to live.  Thus, she writes (pages 103-104):

What I emphasized earlier in the book as the central task of the survivor–regaining a sense of control, coming up with a coherent trauma narrative and integrating it into one’s life story–may be crucial to the task of bearing witness, of living to tell, but it may, if taken too far, hinder recovery, by tethering the survivor to one rigid version of the past.  It may be at odds with telling to live, which I now see as a kind of letting go, playing with the past in order not to be held back as one springs away from it.  After gaining enough control over the story to be able to tell it, perhaps one has to give it up, in order to retell it, without having to ‘get it right,’ without fear of betraying it, to be able to rewrite the past in different ways, leading up to an infinite variety of unforeseeable futures.

My earlier discussions of the primary effects of trauma emphasized the loss of control and the disintegration of the (formerly coherent [as she supposed] self.  My current view of trauma is that it introduces a ’surd’–a nonsensical entry–into the series of events in one’s life, making it impossible to carry on with the series. . . .

I thought I had made a certain sense of things until the moment I was assaulted.  At any rate I thought I knew how to carry on with my life–to project myself, through action, into an imagined future–the way one knows how to go on in a series such as 2, 4, 6, . . . Not that there was a unique pattern leading ineluctably into a predictable future.  The series could have been continued in any number of different ways. . . . But the assumption was that I could find some way of carrying on the narrative of my life.  Trauma shatters this assumption by introducing an event that fits no discernible pattern.  The result is an uneasy paralysis.  I can’t go on, I can’t stay.  All that is left is the present, but one that has no meaning. . . .

Narrative, as I now think, facilitates the ability to go on opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past.  It does this not by reestablishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions.

Trauma breaks the illusion of control.  Even more fundamentally, it breaks the illusion of meaningful coherence on which that of control itself depends—the illusion that there is any meaning that can be made to encompass and “make sense” of everything.  Trauma is what stands as an exception to the rule that everything has to make sense.  It is the ab-surd of non-sense, we might say, building on Brison’s remark that trauma “introduces a ‘surd’—a non-sensical entry—into the series of events in one’s life, making it impossible to carry on with the series.”  Trauma is the non-sense that breaks the frame of reference of sense itself.

Concerning the relationship between endeavor of living to tell and that of telling to live, Brison suggests that it is only at the point of the ultimate collapse of the former that the latter can arise.  The point of the breakdown of the endeavor of living to tell would thus also be the point of breakthrough for the opposed endeavor of telling to live.  Indeed, Brison comes to see the final purpose or function of living to tell, as part of recovery from trauma, to be getting trauma survivors to that point of breakdown and, therefore, possible breakthrough.  In effect, the whole point of living to tell would be to get to the point where living to tell no longer has any point, which is just the point where telling to live comes to have one.  “It may be,” Brison writes  (pages 109-110), “that the retroactive attempt to master the trauma through involuntary repetition is carried out, intrapsychically, until a listener emerges who is stable and reliable enough to bear witness to it.  Perhaps there is a psychological imperative, analogous to the legal imperative, to keep telling one’s story until it is heard.  After the story has been heard and acknowledged, one can let it go, or unfreeze it.  One can unclench.”

What one can at last let go of, is not just the endeavor to make sense of what are supposed to be isolable cases of trauma, as if traumas were just isolated islands of meaninglessness within a vast, surrounding ocean of meaningful events.  Rather, what makes trauma so traumatic in the fist place is that it reveals the nonsense of thinking that everything somehow ultimately makes sense, that there is some sort of ultimate meaning to everything that happens, some sufficient reason for its happening.  Trauma is the revelation that “the principle of sufficient reason” is no principle at all but only, at best, a wish—and, I will add, though I will not discuss the point here, at worst, and all too often, a nightmare.

As Brison writes (on page 116) a few pages after the passage above, focusing on the notion of the self and referring to her rethinking, after her brother’s suicide, of the nature of recovery from trauma:  “Recovery no longer seems to consist of picking up the pieces of a shattered self (or fractured narrative).  It’s facing the fact that there never was a coherent self (or story) to begin with.”   Once one reaches the point where there is no longer any sense to made, one can at last give up the compulsive struggle to make sense of things, including oneself.

At the point where the struggle to make sense out of trauma breaks down, the option of surrendering that struggle yet continuing to live in the non-sense, the absurdity, finally breaks through.  From that point on, to live in such as way as no longer to avoid the trauma one has undergone, but, rather, to face it—to live, that is, in the truth that dawns in trauma itself–one must live in resistance to any claim that what one has suffered has some redeeming meaning.

The meaning of trauma is that there is no meaning to trauma.  Accordingly, recovering from trauma is learning to reject any attempt to give it one.  Recovering from a trauma requires, finally, refusing to grant the trauma any meaning, and insisting, instead, on its meaninglessness.

It is all “in vain.”

* * *

That includes even the trauma of death itself.  The same observation applies not just to some deaths, but to all of them:  Every death is in vain.  We owe it to the dead to remember that, as I will discuss next.

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #8: Resistance and the Refusal of Meaning

My immediately preceding post ended with a discussion of “resistance” as Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri develop that concept in their most recent book.  As Hardt and Negri treat it, resistance is an active principle of affirmation, as opposed to being merely a reactive negation of  what it resists.  Todays’s post continues my discussion of “resistance and the meaning of trauma.”

* * * * *

If resistance is taken in the active, subversive sense conceptualized by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth, then resistance, as they suggest, is laughter in the face of trauma, at least in the face of that trauma that strikes by the hand of another, as an assertion of sovereignty and the power to rule.  The laughter of resistance dispels the illusions with which ruling power surrounds itself in order to preserve its very claim to sovereignty and dominance.

However, what the examples of resistance I have been considering, above all the example of Jean Améry, suggest to be chief among the illusions whereby ruling power preserves itself is the illusion that the trauma to which the exercises of such power subjects those over whom it asserts sovereignty has meaning—that it somehow “makes sense.”   That is a point Susan J. Brison makes poignantly and powerfully, in my judgment, Aftermath:  Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton University Press, 2002).  Brison is a philosopher and a rape survivor.  She was brutally raped and beaten, then left for dead in 1990, when she was living with her husband in the countryside around Grenoble, France.  In Aftermath she effectively combines the account of her traumatic experience, and her recover from it, with her reflections as a trained, professional philosopher.

In her preface to the book, Brison addresses (page x) “[t]he prevalent lack of empathy with trauma victims” that she had the misfortune to encounter firsthand after her rape.  Through reflection on her own experience, she writes, she came to the realization that such lack of empathy “results . . . not merely from ignorance or indifference, but also from an active fear of identifying with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own.”

It is just such lack of control that trauma brings home to those it strikes.  That is a lesson, however, no one wants to learn, and all want to avoid.  Worth noting at the very outset is that it is not only others who want to avoid having to face the reality revealed to them by the stories of the victims of trauma–the reality of not being in control of their own fate.  So, too, do trauma victims themselves want to avoid that reality.   As Brison herself notes later in her book (on page 74), trauma victims will even go to the length of blaming their trauma upon themselves, if that is the only way they can preserve the illusion of having control.  “Whereas rape victims’ self blaming,” she writes in that later passage (page 74), “has often been misunderstood as merely a self-destructive response to rape, arising out of low self-esteem, feelings of shame, or female masochism, and fueled by society’s desire to blame the victim, it can also be seen as an adaptive survival strategy, if the victim has no other way of regaining a sense of control.”

At any rate, to return to the prevalent lack of empathy by which others attempt to avoid what trauma victims have to tell them, in her preface Brison continues by observing that,  “[n]evertheless, the trauma survivor must find empathic listeners in order to carry on.”  She argues that the avoidance manifest in and as “the prevalent lack of empathy for trauma victims” must be overcome, even and especially for the sake of those victims themselves.  Victims themselves need such listeners, not so that they can continue to avoid what their trauma imposes upon them, but so that they can begin truly to face their trauma, and to recover it.  That is because, as Brison points out, “[p]iecing together a shattered self,” the very self shattered by the trauma in the first place, “requires a process of remembering and working through in which speech and affect converge in a trauma narrative.”

Indeed, constructing such a narrative of one’s trauma and recovery actually accomplishes recovery itself.   Succeeding in constructing that narrative is succeeding, to use the way of putting it that Brison borrows from J. L. Austin and “speech act theory,” in performing recovery as such.  The narration “performs” the very healing the story of which it narrates, just as a minister or justice of the peace is not just advancing some claim about the relationship between two people, but is actually marrying them, when the minister or justice of the peace “pronounces” the marriage.  Following Austin, such speech acts are said to be “performative speech acts,” or simply “performatives.”

Accordingly, Brison goes on, in characterizing her own goal in Aftermath:  “In this book I explore the performative aspect of speech in testimonies of trauma:  How saying something about the memory does something to it.  The communicative act of [survivors] bearing witness to traumatic events [that have befallen those survivors themselves] not only transforms traumatic memories into narratives that can then be integrated into the survivor’s sense of self and view of the world, but it also reintegrates the survivor into a community, reestablishing bonds of trust and faith in others.”

A bit later, in the body of her book (page 20), Brison uses her own experience of her first attendance at a rape survivors’ group she joined after eventually returning to the United States to make the same point concretely:  “Our group facilitator [and herself a rape survivor], Ann Gaulin, told us that first meeting [in Philadelphia]:  ‘Although it’s not exactly the sort of thing I can put on my resumé, it’s the accomplishment of which I’m most proud.’”  Brison then turns back to her own case (page 21):

I am not the same person who set off, singing, on that sunny Fourth of July in the French countryside.  I left her in a rocky creek at the bottom of a ravine.  I had to in order to survive.  I understand the appropriateness of what a friend described to me as a Jewish custom of giving those who have outlived a brush with death new names.  The trauma has changed me forever, and if I insist too often that my friends and family acknowledge it, that’s because I’m afraid they don’t know who I am. . . .

And I no longer cringe when I see a woman jogging alone on a country road where I live, although I may still have a slight urge to rush out and protect her, to tell her to come inside where she’ll be safe. But I catch myself, like a mother learning to let go, and cheer her on, thinking, may she always be so carefree, so at home in her world. She has every right to be.

That the right at issue here needs to be so explicitly defended bears its own witness that trauma victims such as Brison herself have lost that “right.”  It is unfortunately all too alienable, as Brison herself goes on to discuss some pages later (pages 65-66), even referring directly to Améry in the process:

. . . many trauma survivors who  endured much worse than I did, and for much  longer, found, often years later, that it was impossible to go on.  It is not a moral failing to leave a world that has become morally unacceptable.  I wonder how some can ask, of battered women, ‘Why didn’t they leave?’ while saying, of those driven to suicide by brutal and inescapable aftermath of trauma, ‘Why didn’t they stay?’  [Auschwitz "survivor" Jean] Améry wrote, ‘Whoever was tortured, stays tortured’ and this may explain why he, [Primo] Levi, and [Paul] Celan and other Holocaust survivors took their own lives decades after their (physical) torture ended, as if such an explanation were needed.