The Sovereignty of the Image #5: The Fiction of Trauma (End)

Below is the conclusion to the draft of the chapter section I began in my immediately preceding post.

NOTE TO READERS:  For the next month and one-half, other priorities will be taking me away from blogging at this site.  Accordingly this will be my last post until early next year.  I hope to put up my next post on January 4, 2010.

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There is something voyeuristic about the fascination with which those who occupy a position of spectator with regard to the traumas of others look upon photographs of the suffering involved.  Susan Sontag reflects on that voyeurism in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), her return after a quarter-century to the concerns she first addressed in On Photography, originally published in 1977 (by the same publisher).  It is worth noting that in Regarding the Pain of Others she raises the issue of voyeurism in relation to photographs of trauma by first contrasting such photographic images to other visual images that, no matter how graphic and “realistic,” involve imaginary, and in that sense fictional or “invented,” events.  Thus, on page 42 she writes:

An invented horror can be quite overwhelming.  (I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject.)  But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror.  Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken [as in an example she has earlier discussed]—or those who could learn from it.  The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

Near the end of her book, Sontag returns to the same issue of the moral inappropriateness and illegitimacy of trafficking in photographic images of trauma, adding another dimension to her critique.  In addition to opening the door to voyeuristic abuses, the proliferation of such images serves, even aside from the intentions of those involved in its production, the powers at work in the perpetration and perpetuation of trauma inflicted by some upon others.  Thus, against the not uncommon idea that the dissemination of such images on television and in other mass media brings spectators to greater understanding and sympathy for the victims of traumatic abuse, Sontag writes (pages 102-103):

The imaginary priority to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the far-away sufferers—seen close up on the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power.  So far as we feel sympathy, we feel that we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.  Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.  To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not at inappropriate response.  To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.

However, Sontag is not some sort of Luddite, calling for dismantling the engines that proliferate the images of others’ sufferings.  Her view in Regarding the Pain of Others is a carefully crafted, nuanced one in which she even takes issue with her own earlier views, as expressed in On Photography.  It is not simply a matter of replacing the idea that the proliferation of such images creates sympathy with the idea that it deadens sympathy, as she had thought at the time she wrote that earlier book.  Rather, it is a matter of reframing the entire discussion.  Thus, just two pages after the passage cited immediately above, she writes in Regarding the Pain of Others (pages 105-106):  “As much as they create sympathy, I wrote [in On Photography], photographs shrivel sympathy.  Is this true?  I thought it was when I wrote it.  I’m not so sure now.”  Then she reframes the whole issue as follows:

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television.  An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen.  Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires.  What looks like callousness has its origins in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images.  Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content.  Image-flow precludes a privileged image.  The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored.  Consumers droop.  They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again.  Content is no more than one of these stimulants.  A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.

Two pages later, on page 108, she adds:

Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality.  Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing the capacity to react.  Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb.  So runs the familiar diagnosis.  But what is really being asked for here?  That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week?  More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography:  an “ecology of images”?  There isn’t going to be an ecology of images.  No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock.  And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.

“Images,” Sontag later (on page 117) recapitulates the view that even she had once espoused, “have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if,” she importantly and ironically concludes, “there were some other way of watching.”   Then on the next page she continues:

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision [those that once caused the ancient Greeks to heap praise upon vision above all the other senses]—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees up for observation and for elective attention.

“But,” Sontag replies against such contemporary disparagement of vision, in contrast to the original praise of it by Plato and the other ancient Greeks, “this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.”  Thus, she continues:  “There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.  To paraphrase several sages:  ‘Nobody can think and hurt someone at the same time.’”

Sontag knows, of course, that there is a perfectly ordinary sense of “thinking” in accordance with which it is all too easy to do just that, “think and hurt someone at the same time.”  In that sense, torture is always a very thoughtful activity:  the torturer must plan ahead and be attentive to what he is doing, to cause the torture victim the maximum of pain, at maximal duration.  In making her remark, however, Sontag is, as it were, thinking of “thinking” in the most highly morally responsive, contemplative sense—the very sense, I might add, that is supposedly at issue in “philosophy.”

In that high sense, a truly thoughtful– “philosophical”—response to “the pain of others” requires precisely the sort of distance that a photograph introduces between the viewer and what is in view in the photographic image.  It is because of the power of photographs to create such necessary distance that, as Judith Butler has recently put it in Frames of War:  When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York:  Verso, 2009, page 96):  “In the last chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others [on page 115], Sontag seeks to counter her earlier critique of photography.  In an emotional, almost exasperated outcry, one that seems quite different from her usual measured rationalism, Sontag remarks:  ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us.’ ”

On the next page, Butler again quotes the same line, calling it “Sontag’s imperative.”   And, in fact, both Sontag’s original discussion and Butler’s later reflections on it serve to show that there is indeed a sort of moral obligation upon those who occupy the position of spectators in relation to the trauma of others–an obligation not to turn away from others’ pain but, instead, precisely to look and see what they have suffered.  Those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, find themselves in such a spectator’s position are ordered, as it were, by the very spectacle they are given to see in such photographs of the pain of others, to continue to “regard” that very pain in those images.  They are obligated, that is, to hold the pain of others so imaged “in a firm, fixed gaze,” a steady gaze in which, in the etymologically original sense of regard, they “keep guard” over that pain, letting themselves be “haunted” by it, as Sontag insists they should do.

However, Sontag’s own remark, cited above, on page 42 of Regarding the Pain of Others, about her own difficulty in viewing such images as Titian’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas, suggests that, paradoxically, it may well often be in just such “invented” images—such fictions or imaginative constructions—that the imperative to continue to look and see others’ pain speaks most clearly, most imperatively.  That is not only because, as Sontag herself observes in the same passage, beholding the fictional or invented representation can engender in the spectator a pure horror, unadulterated by the shame at one’s potential or actual voyeurism with which “real” or photographic representations tend to mix the horror.  It is also because, as fictions—literally, things made or created—“invented” images carry the message of their own having been made or created as part of their very representational content.  As I argued years ago (in my book The Stream of Thought, New York:  The Philosophical Library, 1984), following Heidegger’s remarks along the same lines in “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” that is one of the crucial ways in which what Sontag calls “invented” images differ from photographs, especially those that count as what we call “snap-shots.”

Significantly, to use Butler’s own prime example for her discussion in “Torture and the Ethics of Photography:  Thinking with Sontag,” the second chapter in Frames of War, the notorious photographs of American torture of Muslim prisoners during the war in Iraq in the prison at Abu Ghraib were just such “snap-shots.”  As Butler’s discussion makes clear, it is only insofar as those photographs have been taken up by others–that is, by those who are other than the original producers and consumers of the photographs (the American guards at Abu Ghraib themselves)–and disemminated “outside the scene of [their] production,” as Butler writes at the end of her chapter on Sontag (page 100), that their “circulation . . . has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.”

That is, she argues that it was only when such “outside” circulation occurred that the photographs of torture came to have the power to let us see the very “frame” that otherwise “blinds us to what we see.”  According to Butler, “if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be.”

That means, however, that considered in the scene of their production and in terms of their representational content–what is actually photographically visible within that same scene—the photographs from Abu Ghraib just do not problematize that “forcible frame” itself.  They presuppose it, rather than calling attention to it, and thereby leave it “out of the picture” altogether.  Only when the photographs are, as it were, forced out of that “forcible frame,” does the fact, manner, and significance of their own production, their own having been made, come “into the picture.”

In contrast, it is in the “invented” visual image—or in the “fiction” in general—of torture and abuse that what is so brought into the image is itself revealed in its own having been made, its own having been invented.  In the fiction, the fictive nature—which is to say the non-“natural”-ness, the artificiality, the “forc-ed”-ness—of what is represented, in the scene of its own production, its own making or invention, is brought to attention.

In sum:  In the face of the fictional representation of trauma inflicted upon others, the spectator is brought face to face with the fic-tion, the pro-duction, of such trauma itself.  The fictional trauma lets us see the fully fictional status of what purports to be an “act of God” in the sense that insurance companies use that expression to get themselves off the hook of liability for a disaster:  The fiction of trauma in the “objective” sense (that is, the fiction “of” trauma in the sense of the fictive, as opposed to photographic, imaging of trauma) lets us see the fiction of trauma in the “subjective” sense (the sense in which trauma itself creates fictions, makes up stories, about itself).

That holds, at least, for trauma perpetrated by some upon others, as the American guards perpetrated trauma upon the prisoners they tortured at Abu Ghraib, or the Nazis perpetrated it upon the Jews.  However, I will begin the next section of this chapter with some reflections suggesting that it holds for all trauma, not just for that in which we can distinguish perpetrators from victims.  I will argue that the internal structure of trauma is such that trauma makes a fiction of itself.

The Sovereignty of the Image #4: The Fiction of Trauma (Beginning)

Today, once again, I am able to post only the beginning of a new section to the draft of a chapter called “Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” for a book I am planing on topics pertaining to trauma and philosophy.  In my next post, scheduled for Monday, November 16, I hope to finish this chapter section, which I am calling “The Fiction of Trauma.”

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Coincidentally, in the same January 9, 2009, Sunday New York Times that contained Jacob Heilbrunn’s criticism of recent films depicting the Holocaust, discussed earlier this chapter, there also appeared a book review by Richard Lourie of H. G. Adler’s novel The Journey, the English translation of which, by Peter Filkins, appeared only the year before (New York:  Random House, 2008).  As one learns from Lourie’s review, as well as from Filkins’s introduction to his translation of the book itself, Adler was born in Prague in 1910 into a secularized Jewish family, and was himself a survivor of both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.  Adler survived eighteen other members of his family who died in the Nazi camps, including his wife, her mother, and his own parents.  After liberation, Adler eventually settled in London, where he wrote, among other things, The Journey, detailing in fictionalized form his own journey during the Nazi era.

Both Lourie’s review and Filkins’s introduction, as well as Adler’s son Jeremy Adler’s afterword, to The Journey also acquaint the reader with the journey of its own that Adler’s book–written in German during 1950-1951, we are told in the son’s afterword–itself had to take before it was finally published in Germany in 1962.  In all three places–Richard Lourie’s review, Peter Filkins’s introduction, and Jeremy Adler’s afterword—we are told that the influential German publisher Peter Suhrkamp vowed that the book would never be published in Germany, so long as he lived.  And it wasn’t.  Even after publication, the book languished, little known and little read, until only recently, as is indicated by an English language translation not appearing until 2008.

Both Lourie and Filkins connect Suhrkamp’s insistent stance against publishing the book at all, with the dominance at the time of the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno, who famously declared that literature was no longer possible after Auschwitz.  Adorno argued that the very idea of transforming the horror of the Holocaust into fiction or poetry was morally unacceptable.  It was blasphemous and obscene, to use the same terms I already used myself, in an earlier part of this chapter, to characterize any “exploitation,” as Heilbrunn appropriately names it in his review of recent films focused on the Holocaust, of “Auschwitz”—any exploitation, that is, of all that that name has come to stand for–even and especially for the sake of telling any tale of redemption that would give the Holocaust meaning after the fact.

Interestingly, H. G. Adler himself refuses to tell any such redemption tale in The Journey.  Nevertheless, the background story about his novel’s own journey helps to focus the issue with which Adorno and many since him, including Heilbrun and historian Dominick LaCapra, whom I also have already  mentioned earlier in this chapter.  As we might put it, against the background of the history of Adler’s novel, that is the issue of the morality of fictionalized representations of such shared, historically significant, intentionally perpetrated traumas as the Holocaust or, to give a later example, 9/11.  Especially in such cases, does fictional representation of trauma and its victims cross over into perpetuation of the traumatic abuse at issue?

The broader, framing question to which that of the morality of creating and disseminating fictional images of trauma belongs is the question of just where representation in images as such begins to cross over into morally treacherous territory.  At just what point does such representation begin to risk falling into blasphemy and obscenity?

With regard to that general question, I want to maintain the following thesis: All other things being equal (note that important qualification), the less “fictional,” which is to say the more “realistic,” the representation or image, the greater the risk of such blasphemy and obscenity.  To put the point hyperbolically, I might say that, with regard to such traumatic events as “Auschwitz,” the more photo-graphic, the more porno-graphic.  That is, the more closely the representing of such traumas comes to what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction,” in his often-cited article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as it does in photographic images, the more morally questionable it becomes:  The closer representation comes to reproduction in and as such an image, the greater the risk of blasphemy and obscenity becomes.

The Sovereignty of the Image #3: Images of Avoidance (concluded)

Below is the conclusion of what I was only able to begin in my preceding post–a section called “Images of Avoidance” in my draft of a chapter called “Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” for what I hope will eventually be a book on trauma and philosophy.  In that preceding post I discussed two examples of the “instrumentalization” of trauma that graphic-artist Art Spiegelman mentions in his post-911 book In the Shadow of No Towers, and how such instrumentalization interconnects with the proliferation of images of trauma.  I pick up at that point below.

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The same inseparability of the proliferation of images of trauma and the instrumentalization of it is already manifest in the simple attempt to “get over” trauma, even aside from any commitments to special causes, such as both of Spiegelman’s examples involve–as does LaCapra’s, of the Nazi use of the image of “the Jew”.  The mere endeavor to “put it behind us” in order to “go on with our lives” already contains, in effect, a betrayal of the traumatized, including ourselves when we are among the wounded.  Thus, for example, Thomas de Zengotita wrote of Americans in a piece called “The Numbing of the American Mind:  Culture as Anaesthetic” a few months after 9/11 in the April 2002 edition of Harper’s magazine that—at least “if we were spared a gaping wound in the flesh and blood of personal life” as the result of losing someone close to us personally—“we inevitably moved on after September 11.”  He then expresses clearly the connection between “moving on” and the reduction of 9/11 to images:  “We were carried off by endlessly proliferating representations of the event. . . .  Conditioned thus relentlessly to move from representation to representation, we got past the thing itself as well; or rather, the thing itself was transformed into a sea of signs.”

In fact, even for someone who does suffer significant personal loses, leaving “a gaping wounds in the flesh and blood of personal life,” as de Zengotita says, the same process of “moving on” still typically occurs eventually, though it may take prolonged therapy for that to happen.  Indeed, the very production of any representation of trauma, any encapsulating of trauma in an image–which production or encapsulation does indeed, to borrow de Zengotita’s fitting word, “inevitably” occur after trauma–serves that same process at least to some degree.  Inevitably, then, even apart from all betrayal by others, traumatized persons, in all their flesh and blood concretion and with all their gaping wounds, will betray themselves, substituting images or representations for “the thing itself,” which here means the still surviving, deeply wounded traumatized person herself or himself.  As Orly Lubin, Chair of the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature of Tel Aviv, writes in her contribution to the post-9/11 collection Trauma at Home, after citing de Zengotita’s remarks:

Representation, then, is in the service of creating an imagined community that will provide an easily digested set of morals applicable to representations rather than to flesh and blood.  The ethics of representation (should Jules Naudet photograph the two people on fire to show the world the results of the wickedness of the terrorists, or would that be invading their privacy?) replaces the ethics of policymaking, since the results of the latter are prevented from [reaching] the community as they do not become representations due to the ruling ethics of representation.  The community provides the representation as a gateway away from the horrors of responsibility [for oneself as an individual] and then accountability [as belonging to a group].

I will return to Orly’s essay later in this chapter, when the time comes to address what alternative there may be to betraying trauma by burying it beneath a sea or signs, representations, or images.  For now, however, what I want to emphasize is how accounts such as hers or de Zengotita’s allow us to begin to trace the betrayal of trauma and the traumatized back into the internal structure of trauma itself.  What such accounts point to is, in fact, a characteristic that has been attributed to trauma at least since Freud, with his insistence on the peculiar temporality of trauma, which always involves what he calls “belatedness” (Nachträlichkeit).  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives what has become the classic example, that of someone who lives through a serious train wreck with no immediately apparent ill effects from the accident, but who later—after a period of “latency,” as Freud calls it—develops such symptoms as nightmares, difficulty sleeping, phobias, or other mental-behavioral difficulties.  Thus, the manifestation of any “wound,” which is to say of any trauma itself, does not occur until some time after the presumably traumatic event.  It is as if the trauma, the wounding, does not occur when it first occurs, but only belatedly, as a sort of after-effect, an after-shock of an original shock.

In contemporary trauma studies a distinction is sometimes drawn between trauma resulting from a single significant event or episode, such as the railroad accident of Freud’s definitive example, and trauma resulting from a series of repeated events or episodes, such as a child who has been traumatized by a long history of abuse.   Trauma of the latter sort is sometimes called “recurrent” trauma.

However, given the “belatedness” characteristic of trauma, at least in Freud’s account of it, one might well argue that at bottom all trauma is “recurrent,” so to speak.  Insofar as trauma is defined by Freudian Nachträglichkeit, the very “occurrence” of trauma must be characterized in terms of a re-occurrence, as it were–the coming back around again of what was denied a place to take place in the first place, one might say.

To put the same point a bit differently, phenomenologically trauma always has the structure that Jean-Francois Lyotard in Heidegger and “the jews”, to which I have already referred more than once in earlier chapters, calls a “double blow.”  He couples that notion with the distinction Freud draws–and which plays an even more important role in Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud–between “originary” or “primary” repression and “secondary” repression.

“The double blow,” according to Lyotard’s description in Heidegger and “the jews” (on pages 15-16), “includes a first blow, the first excitation, which upsets [what Freud likes to call] the [psychic] apparatus with such ‘force’ that it is not registered.”  Hence, in such “originary repression,” in one sense nothing at all is “repressed,” strictly speaking, since nothing has “registered” in the first place, such that it would need to be or even could be “repressed.”  Accordingly, Lyotard writes:  “The discovery of [such] an originary repression leads Freud to assume that it cannot be represented.  And it is not representable because, in dynamic terms, the quantity of energy transmitted by this ’shock’ is not transformed into ‘objects,’ not even inferior ones, objects lodged in the substratum, in the hell of the soul, but it remains potential, unexploitable, and thus ignored by the apparatus”—though “ignored” may be a misleading word here, since one can only ignore what is at least first given, whereas the “first blow” is precisely one that is not at first given at all, exceeding as it does the very capacities of reception of the psychic “apparatus.”

“The first blow, then,” as Lyotard goes on to say, “strikes the apparatus without observable internal effect, without affecting it”–that is, without being felt in the first place, not even as a blow.  Thus, what he calls the first blow “is a shock without affect.”

The first blow, however, is not the only one.  The first blow is eventually followed by a second one.  Whereas the first blow is a shock without affect: “With the second blow there takes place an affect without shock.”  Lyotard’s example shows that what he means is the “belated” manifestation, in symptoms that appear only after a period of “latency,” that there has been an earlier traumatic occurrence:

I buy something in a store, anxiety crushes me, I flee, but nothing had really happened. . . . And it is this flight, that feeling that accompanies it, which informs consciousness that there is something, without being able to tell what it is. . . .   The essence of the [traumatic] event:  that there is comes before what there is.

This ‘before’ of the quod [the "that"] is also an ‘after’ of the quid [the "what"].  For whatever is now happening in the store (i.e., the terror and the flight) does not come forth; it comes back from the first blow, from the shock, from the ‘initial’ excess that remained outside the scene, even unconscious, deposited outside representation.

To this way of thinking, then, all trauma as such would have the paradoxical structure of a “return of the repressed” in which there is a re-turn of what was denied any turn in the first place, as we might say.  In that sense, all trauma would be “recurrent” trauma.

What is more, the “recurrence” of the trauma in the appearance of symptoms after a period of latency is itself a matter of representation, in the sense of a substitution of images or signs for “the thing itself,” Lyotard’s “first blow”–that “’initial’ excess” that does not itself really initiate anything, at least not anything “representable,” since it has always “remained outside the scene, even unconscious, deposited outside [all] representation.”  Thus, this manifestation in belated symptoms, substituting representations, images, or signs for that which is always already beyond all representation, imagination, or signification, is necessarily a distortion and falsification of what it manifests.  Such “secondary repression” thus becomes repression in the genuine sense of a pushing down and away, a burying, of what it pretends, in effect, to represent or signify.  It becomes the “willful ignorance”–to borrow an expression that 20^th century avant-garde American novelist John Hawkes uses, in Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, to define “stupidity”–whereby the very victims of trauma themselves practice the denial and avoidance of the fact of their ever having been traumatized in the first place.

Thus, the belated symptoms that represent earlier trauma themselves turn out to be images of avoidance.

The Sovereignty of the Image #2: Images of Avoidance

Today I am able to post only the beginning of a new section of my draft of a chapter–”Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image”–for a book I am planning on trauma and philosophy.  In my next post, I hope to finish the section begun below, on “Images of Avoidance.”

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“Nothing like commemorating an event to make you forget it.”

Graphic-artist Art Spiegelman makes that remark in Plate 10 of In the Shadow of No Towers (New York:  Pantheon Books, 2004), his graphic-novel on September 11, 2001.  Spiegelman, the son of Holocaust survivors, earlier won the Pulitzer Prise for  Maus, his two-volume graphic novel of the Holocaust and its aftermath in the lives not only of survivors themselves but also of their offspring.  A native of New York who has lived there all his life, he and his wife and children were in the city when the attacks on the Twin Towers occurred.

In a two page essay that begins In the Shadow of No Towers Spiegelman tells the reader that in the first few days after 9/11 he “got lost constructing conspiracy theories about [the American] government’s complicity in what had happened.”  Then he writes: “Only when I heard paranoid Arabs and Americans blaming it all on the Jews did I reel myself back in, deciding it wasn’t essential to know precisely how much my ‘leaders’ knew about the hijackings in advance–it was sufficient that they immediately instrumentalized the attack for their own agenda.”

What is at issue in cases such as the second one Spiegelman mentions, involving something such as a governmental co-optation of trauma for its own purposes, fits generally within the category of what, for one, Dominick LaCapra, a contemporary American historian with special expertise in trauma studies, especially as it pertains to the Holocaust, calls “founding traumas.”  That is, what is at issue is the use of a trauma for the purposes of justifying and then repeatedly reinforcing some institution or institutionalized behavior, as the Holocaust itself is used to justify the foundation of the state of Israel after World War II, and then extended to justify Israel’s ongoing policies toward the Palestinians and toward neighboring Arab states into the present.  Similarly, the Bush administration used “9/11” as a “founding trauma” to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, passage and implementation of the Patriot Act, holding “enemy combatants” indefinitely without trial in Guantanamo, “rendition” of prisoners to countries practicing torture, and so forth.

The other case Spiegelman mentions, that of his “paranoid Arabs and Americans blaming it [9/11] all on the Jews,” fits a different category that LaCapra also addresses.  As an example of this second category LaCapra also uses the figure of “the Jew,” only in his case is it the use of that figure by the Nazis to justify the “final solution” of “extermination” of millions in the Holocaust.  Concerning this category of what, following Spiegelman, we can appropriately call the instrumentalization of trauma, LaCapra writes (in History and Memory after Auschwitz, p. 187):  “Particularly when one avoids recognizing the sources of anxiety in oneself (including elusive sources that are not purely empirical or historical in nature), one may be prone to project all anxiety-producing forces onto a discreet other who becomes a scapegoat or even an object of quasi-sacrificial behavior in specific historical circumstances.”

At any rate, although Spiegelman himself in the lines cited above–about “paranoid Arabs and Americans blaming it all on the Jews,” on the one hand, and the official American governmental response of using the attack to further its “own agenda,” on the other–may conflate the two kinds of cases, there are important distinctions that need to be drawn between the two categories of such instrumentalization involved.  In the next chapter (“Representation and Trauma II:  The Image of Sovereignty”) I will discuss the crucial differences between the two in greater detail.  For my purposes in this present chapter, however, what interests me is not how the two cases differ from one another.  Rather, it is the similarity between the two, such that they can come to be coupled as Spiegelman couples them.  What is it about the two, such that reflecting on one can yield insight into the other?

Apparently, what connects them for Spiegelman is simply that both do indeed involve an “instrumentalization” of the attacks on 9/11.  Both involve treating the attacks as mere means for achieving prior, independent ends—that is, ends prior to and independent of the response that the attacks themselves demand of us.  Both deflect the impulse to respond to the attacks themselves, directing it into preset channels, and distorting it in the process.

What is at issue in both cases, then, would be literally a making-use of the attacks, a giving usage to them.  Thereby, the attacks are forced to make sense, rather than allowed to stand there in their full awfulness as the horrifyingly senseless catastrophe that they truly are.

Such shanghaiing of trauma to do service for some outside agenda has about it the same air of offense, even of obscenity that for so many observers accompanied the incessant media loop of images of the attacks on Manhattan’s Twin Towers, especially the images of men and women, sometimes hand in hand, jumping to their deaths rather than suffering immolation.  Spiegelman himself is not unaware of the connection, as he demonstrates by writing, on the second page of the same opening essay on the first page of which he remarks on the two cases of “instrumentalizing” 9/11, that he “wanted to sort out the fragments of what I’d experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw.”  Indeed, the instrumentalization of the 9/11 attacks and the flood of images of them in the mass media worked together, each feeding and reinforcing the other, to increase the threat of such inundation, in which the events themselves would be buried beneath the waves, at risk of sinking so deep into the sea of images as eventually to be beyond all possibility of salvage and recall.

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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.