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.”
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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.
