The Sovereignty of the Image #10: Scanning the Screen (beginning)

Below is the continuation of my draft for a book-chapter tentatively entitled “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image.”

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Scanning the Screen

In Writing History, Writing Trauma Dominick LaCapra follows up his remark, cited earlier in this chapter, about what he calls “structural” trauma not being curable—and thereby also suggesting that for him what he calls “historical trauma” is somehow “curable”—by commenting (on page 83) on a view he sees as common to various other contemporary American historians.  According to LaCapra, the other historians at issue seem to take it for granted that “once there was a single narrative that most Americans accepted as part of their heritage,” but which has more recently been shattered into a multiplicity of diverse stories (one story for white Americans, another for black; one for men, another for women; one for straights, one for gays; etc.).  LaCapra critiques such an idea as being “close to reductive contextualism . . . in which the proverbial past-we-have-lost becomes the  metanarrative we have lost.”  Against such an idea, LaCapra expresses doubt that any such common American metanarrative ever really existed.  Rather, “one might argue,” he writes, “that there never was a single narrative and that most Americans never accepted only one story about the past.”

But, pace LaCapra, one might also argue that the other historians at issue could be taken to be sharing, with one another and with unspecified “others,” what amounts to a screen memory in the sense I have been trying to articulate.  In that case, one would not be dealing in the first place with any simple “empirical” claim that a grand American metanarrative once existed, a claim that then others might then deny (as LaCapra denies it).  One would be dealing, instead, with a truth the “truth” of which was itself traumatic, in effect.  The issue of determining the “truth” of the screen memory at issue would then no longer consist of checking for correspondences between the claim that there once was such a common American metanarrative, on the one hand, and “what really happened,” on the other.  Rather, determining the “truth” of the widespread assumption that there once was such a metanarrative would consist of carefully unknotting the various interconnections of disclosure and concealment at play in that very notion.  Accordingly, what would be required would be to treat that idea as symptomatic, in effect, of the very traumatic “structural” fissures that have indeed fractured and fragmented American society throughout its history—those very divisions that the notion of a common metanarrative both hides and reveals at one and the same time.  To “understand” the idea of such a common American metanarrative would require that we “read” it in terms of that traumatic subtext, just as a Freudian analyst would “read” a slip of the tongue, for example.  To remain fixated on the question of the degree of photographic “accuracy” of the idea of a common American metanarrative, and to think that one could dispel that idea by pointing out its “inaccuracy,” as LaCapra tries to do, would then be to fall prey to the same sort of ontological confusion as Gass’s “discornered dunce” who fails to grasp the context that establishes a carrot as a snowman’s nose.

To cite another important example that raises the same underlying issues, in the 1990s verbal battles in the media and culture in general, as well as legal ones in the courts, broke out in the United States over a series of sensational, highly publicized cases in which criminal charges were brought against various defendants on the basis of purported victims’  “recovered memories” of theretofore supposedly “repressed” experiences of childhood sexual abuse.  The focus of nearly all public debate at the time and since has been on whether the supposedly “recovered” memories at issue were “true” memories—that is, accurate memory images of something that “ really happened”–or whether they were, instead, “false” memories—images presenting themselves as memories but that had been somehow unintentionally  (or at least presumably so) “implanted” in the minds of those who eventually leveled the charges of abuse, to which, however, no actual past occasion of abuse “really” corresponded.

Both sides to the debate—those, for example, who called upon everyone to “believe the [at least erstwhile] children” who claimed to “remember” having been abused, on the one side, and those who developed the concept of “false memory syndrome” and promoted the idea that most if not all of the charges in the most highly publicized cases of the time were made by persons who suffered from such a syndrome, on the other side—continued to operate with an understanding of memory in accordance with which the “truth” or “falsity” of a memory image is taken to be a matter of the image more or less photographically corresponding, or failing to correspond, to “reality,” to “what really happened.”  For the most part, what was and has continued to be lacking in the entire debate has been any consideration of what I have been trying to articulate here as the “screen” nature of all memories of trauma, regardless of how photographically “accurate” or “inaccurate” they may be.  However, it is just that screening relationship between trauma and the images in which trauma figures or represents itself that must be fully considered in any final assessment of what is at issue in all cases such as those infamous childhood sexual abuse ones of the 1990s.

What is needed for such an assessment is an analysis of the “memories” at issue in terms that proceeds along the same lines as Michael Pollack follows in a different but closely related context—that of assessing the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors–in his L’expérience concentrationnaire, which I have already cited before in this chapter (for the story of Ruth, the Jewish Auschwitz survivor from Berlin).   In a lucid discussion of his own methodology in the introduction to the second part of his book, Pollack reflects upon the methods adopted by many other researches addressing the same material, namely, testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

Knowing that every testimony is subject to doubt with regard to its “accuracy,” many researchers conclude that any testimony must therefore be treated with suspicion to arrive at an “objective” assessment of its veracity and value.  Accordingly, it is standard for such researchers to follow procedures to eliminate the supposedly “subjective” aspects of the testimonies with which they are concerned.

As a good example of someone who adopts that approach, Pollack cites fellow Holocaust researcher Miriam Novitch, from her book Les Passages des Barbares (Nice:  Presses du Temps présent, no date), a study on the deportation and resistance of Greek Jews during the Second World War.  Novitch writes (page 5 of her book, as cited in Pollack, page 181):  “Knowing that all testimony is subject to caution, we strove to interrogate several people on the same subject and to verify the facts recounted by means of other sources.”

“In so proceeding,” Pollack comments, after citing Novitch’s line, “one eliminates what cannot be confirmed by a multiplicity of sources, toward the end of reconstructing the hard core of what really happened.  But one risks by the same token occluding the tension, constitutive of testimony on the deportations, between what can be spoken, and what is unspeakable [entre dicible et indicible].”  He then contrasts such a procedure with what he and his colleagues adopted as the methodology for their own work.  Contrary to the approach such researchers as Novitch adopt, Pollack writes, the “problematic” for him and his fellow interviewers in their own work was based on the supposition “that every document has a sense, on condition of restoring the system for locating this sense.”  That is, in their own procedure he and his colleagues were not focused on the supposed  “historical accuracy” of the accounts their interviewees gave, but, rather, on coming to an understanding of the sense or meaning of what they recounted or recalled as it functioned in the context of their own ongoing endeavor to “maintain their social identity,” to put it in terms of the subtitle Pollack gives his book (“an essay on the maintenance of social identity”).

Pollack’s own approach, then, is basically the same as that of Dori Laub when, in a passage I have already cited and discussed in an earlier chapter, he responds to a group of historians who want to discount an Auschwitz survivor’s recollection of multiple Auschwitz crematoria smokestacks being destroyed during the Sondercommando inmate rebellion at Auschwitz.  The historians Laub was addressing wanted to dismiss that survivor’s testimony because “in reality” only one crematorium smokestack was destroyed during the incident in question.  However, Laub responds that what he calls the genuine “historical truth” of the testimony is expressed by the very supposed “mistake,” insofar as, in the circumstances of Auschwitz, any act of rebellion among the inmates there was as such—independent of its “success” by ordinary ways of measuring such things—a complete success in terms of revealing the total vacuity of the Nazi claims of superiority and domination upon which the whole camp system was based.  The genuinely historical truth of the supposedly “inaccurate” memory was that it altogether “accurately” reflected what the mere fact of there being a rebellion at all at Auschwitz demonstrated beyond doubt—namely, in effect, to use the relevant line from the fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson, that “the emperor had no clothes.”

What is necessary, to grasp “historical truth” itself, in Laub’s sense of that term—which is in fact the only sense that makes any sense, if we are to let history itself happen, rather than flattening it down to the level of some idiotic story of “one damned thing after another”—is to follow the procedure that Pollack recommends.  “Rather than concentrating attention on the content of what is said,” he writes, we need to attend to the various conditions that shape the given content of a given testimony, in order to recreate the set of crisscrossing connections that allow us to discern the sense of that content.

That does not at all mean that independent verification, comparison of accounts from diverse sources, and, in general, efforts carefully to sort out “what really happened” at the level of surface information that might have been registered by cameras, tape-recorders, or other such archiving devices, is not relevant.  What it means, however, is that all such information, however accurate and exhaustive it may be in its own terms, is never more than raw data, as it were, that must be interpreted properly, if it is ever to yield genuine insight into what really did “happen,” in the strong sense of that term—what really “made history” rather than just being one more link in the endless chain of “one damned thing after another.”

The Sovereignty of the Image #8: Screen Memory (second continuation)

It is exactly by making a sort of second-order mistake, that is, a mistaking of the difference between two very different ways of making mistakes—namely, in this case, “ontically” and “ontologically,” to use the terminology of Gass and Heidegger (at least the early Heidegger)–that is at issue when contemporary American historian and trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra warns against confusing what he calls “historical trauma” with what he calls “structural trauma.”  By the former, LaCapra means a trauma that can be traced back to a datable occurrence, such as a train wreck, to use Freud’s example, or such as the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  In contrast, what LaCapra calls structural trauma is trauma that cannot be reduced to the effects of any single datable occurrence or, in fact, even any series of such occurrences, but that, as the name implies, somehow belongs to the very structure of human experience as such, either universally or in some more limited frame of consideration.

According to LaCapra, it is important not to confuse one of those two sorts of trauma, historical or structural, with the other.  To reduce the one to the other is, as he puts it in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, page 82), to commit one of two possible errors.   On the one hand, one can fall into error by coming “to generalize structural trauma so that it absorbs or subordinates the significance of historical trauma.”  On the other hand, instead of reducing historical trauma to structural trauma, one can commit an opposite and equal error by trying, “on the contrary, to explain all post-traumatic, extreme, uncanny phenomena and responses as exclusively caused by particular events or contexts.”   “When structural trauma is reduced to, or figured as, an event,” he writes, “one has the genesis of myth [in the negative sense of that term whereby a myth is a sort of “false story”] wherein trauma is enacted in a story from which later traumas seem to derive (as in Freud’s primal crime or in the case of original sin attendant upon the Fall from Eden).”   LaCapra adds that this second error, that of reducing structural trauma to something historical, involves “what one might term reductive contextualism,” of which he uses as an example “deriving anxiety in Heidegger’s thought [where it plays a major role, at least in Being and Time and other early works] exclusively from conditions in interwar Germany.”

LaCapra prefaces his discussion of these two equal but opposite errors, both of which involve confusing structural with historical trauma, by remarking that  “[t]he belated temporality of trauma and the elusive nature of the shattering experience related to it render the distinction between structural and historical trauma problematic,” although, he adds, they “but do not make it irrelevant.”  Yet, so far as I can see, LaCapra himself nowhere specifies clearly just how–and where–the distinction must be problematized, in order adequately to accommodate the two factors he mentions (the “belatedness” of trauma and its “shattering” quality).

In my judgment, fellow American trauma theorist Paul Eisenstein, a literary scholar who specializes in modern German literature, is more helpful than LaCapra on that score.  In his excellent book Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (SUNY, 2003), Eisenstein insists–correctly, I am convinced–that what LaCapra calls “historical” trauma presupposes what LaCapra calls “structural” trauma.  In effect, to put Eisenstein in my own words, what makes any datable occurrence traumatic in the first place is that it focuses, both revealing and concealing at once, a structural fault or gap that pervades and disrupts experience itself “from within,” as it were, to use the way Taylor puts the point in the passage I cited above, about how every figure is always disfigured.

We might also profitably put the point by using Freud’s well-known notion of the “screen memory,” though introducing an ambiguity into that term that is not present, or at least not obviously so, in Freud’s own usage.  That is, we might well say that any datable occurrence can come to be traumatic precisely and only insofar as it functions as a “screen” for the underlying structural trauma, in a double sense of “screening.”  By the fist of the two senses at issue, a “screen” would be something that masks, dissembles, or covers-over whatever it provides a screen for, screening it off from view.  But by the second sense of the term, a “screen” would be, rather, something that served as a sort of projection surface, as a movie screen provides such a surface for projecting filmed images.

Putting all the pieces together, I would argue that, to paraphrase Spinoza, nothing is ever traumatic, save screening make it so.  Precisely because of its in-dissociable “belated” and “shattering” qualities, to use LaCapra’s own terms, what he calls “structural” trauma must and can take place—literally:  make and hold a place for itself–only by screening (i.e., maskingly projecting) itself as a specific image–screening itself, in short, as “historical” trauma.  In turn, “historical” trauma is not a kind of trauma distinct from “structural” trauma as another kind.  Rather, historical trauma is the taking place of structural trauma itself.  Only insofar as some datable occurrence has the features that make it suitable for being so employed, that is, for serving as such a screen in the double sense at issue, can such an occurrence, when “taken over” by a structural fault for so screening itself, be traumatic.

After all, what is traumatic for one person may not be so for another.  For example, sometimes the break-up of a marriage or other long-term relationship will leave one or both parties no more affected, at least visibly, that a scraped knee, whereas for another couple it is more like a heat attack or a stroke.  The difference is no more a matter of the ontic properties of one occurrence compared to another, than it is a matter of such ontic properties that differentiates a carrot ready for eating from one already in use as a snowman’s nose.  Just as what makes the carrot into a nose is a matter of ontological, as opposed to ontic, transformation, to use Gass’s way of putting it, so is what makes an occurrence traumatic the same sort of transformation.  In both cases, carrot-nose and occurrence-trauma, what is at issue is establishing a new set of crossed contexts and significations, as Gass puts it.

Of course, it is only thanks to its ontic properties that a given datable event will offer itself to serve as such as place for structural fault to take its own place.  In the same way, it is only thanks to its ontic properties that a carrot is suited to become a snowman’s nose, but a cabbage or a leaf of lettuce is not.  Not every surface is suitable to become a screen.

LaCapra writes (Writing History, Writing Trauma, page 84), that structural trauma “may not be cured but only lived with in various ways.  Nor,” he then adds, “may it be reduced to a dated historical event or derived from one.”  But, to speak paradoxically, neither can an “historical” trauma be “cured,” nor can it “be reduced to a dated historical event.”  To put the paradox most sharply, we can say that a dated historical event is as such no longer an historical event at all!  History is not, in that sense, a series of datable events.  It is never just “one damned thing after another.”  If it were, then it would altogether lose its event-ful-ness, the very quality whereby not everything that happens is as such an “historical” event, but only those things the happening of which is genuinely  “an event.”  Becoming “historical” is itself a matter of ontological, not onltic, transformation.

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.

Responding to Trauma #4: Paul Eisenstein on “the Traumatic Kernel”

Below is the continuation of my draft of a chapter for an eventual book.

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The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

“We are all Americans now.”  That was the famous front-page headline in Le Monde the morning after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  What might have come to pass if, instead, following Marguerite Duras’s line of thought at the end of World War II about the crimes of the Nazis, it had read:  “We are all terrorists now”?

In Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (SUNY, 2003) literary theorist Paul Eisenstein, specialist in German literature, suggests that what decent non-Jewish Germans should have done after the beginning of Nazi action against Jewish Germans on Kristallnacht in 1938 is what a few of them actually did, when they put the Star of David in their own shop-windows, actively and effectively identifying themselves with their vandalized Jewish neighbors.  That is, Eisenstein argues, after Kristallnacht the only thing left for non-Jewish Germans of conscience to do was to proclaim that they were all Jews now, too.   Those who did just that in one fashion or another chiseled their own water troughs of promise in the rock.

What Duras adds to the work of that promise is the insight that, once the Nazi extermination camps were opened, the only way all the prisoners of those camps could be set free and kept that way was for all those with a conscience, who so recently all needed to become Jews, to become, now that the Nazis were at last defeated, Nazis in their own turn.  Paradoxical as it may seem, that was the only way, she saw, to turn aside from the Nazi road—or, better, from that long, long road of which only an all too long and too recent stretch bore the Nazi name, but which has borne many other names both before and since the Nazis.  Only so could one wake from the dream, letting its phantoms dissolve in the morning sun while one went about one’s daily business.

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In Traumatic Encounters Eisenstein provides an excellent analysis of liberalism–in the classic sense of that term, not the modern, American one–as sharing with Fascism the endeavor to avoid trauma (pp. 42ff).  But I am not sure that he fully appreciates what his own analysis shows, or at least what it showed me.   I will use a line of Eisenstein’s own, to point to what I think that is. Early on in the book (namely, on page 42), he uses the phrase, “the prevention of future catastrophes,” to name the goal to the service of which he hopes his own analysis may contribute.   (In the next sentence, he does go on to qualify that statement a bit, but not in a way that affects what I want to say here).

The argument he advances is that both liberalism and National Socialism end up “disavowing” the “traumatic kernel”—what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the point de capiton, the “quilting point”–that is “internal” to any political order (like the point of “decision” from which law and legal right themselves come, according to the right-wing German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who used his thought to support the Nazi state, though Eisenstein does not draw that connection himself).  They disavow that “traumatic instability/inconsistency” that is internal to any and every social order, by turning it into a definite historical “something,” rather than keeping cognizant of what Eisenstein, using a Kantian terminology, calls its “transcendence”—by giving the traumatic kernel or quilting point (p. 45) “a context, a history, from the beginning.”  Eisenstein uses “the figure of the Jew” in National Socialism as his example.  However, his analysis also applies just as well, so far as I can see, to the liberal construction of any such presumed actual historical starting point, whether that be “the state of nature” of classical social contract theory, or even John Rawls’s notion of  “the original position” in his contemporary reworking of such theory.

At any rate, what it seems to me Eisenstein himself may miss, or at least underemphasize, in his persuasive analysis is precisely what it brought most clearly to my own attention:  that the very endeavor to “prevent” such catastrophes as the Holocaust is itself a move of just the sort he so clearly exposes in liberalism and National Socialism.  In short, it is precisely the endeavor to secure oneself against a future recurrence of catastrophe that counter-intentionally ends up generating just such recurrence—indeed, that requires such catastrophe to found itself and whatever order it imposes, found itself and its order in and as the very disavowal of the un-disavowable occurrence of trauma.

The discussion could also be cast in terms of the notion of idolatry. National Socialism, liberalism, and, if I am right, Eisenstein’s own notion of “preventing future catastrophes” are all “idolatrous,” in that they all make the contextualizing, historizing move whereby a “transcendence” is made into an “object,” to use the Kantian language Eisenstein himself does.  They all make God into an idol.

Eisenstein himself elsewhere in the same book all but sees and says the same thing, when he argues, contra contemporary American historian Dominic LaCapra, that what the latter calls “structural trauma” is actually the very “precondition” for “historical trauma,” and that it is only by remembering or 
”repeating” the former that we can lessen the frequency of the latter.   But what does that entail, if not that the very focus on “preventing” “historical” trauma engenders, against its own apparent intention, more and ever more of the very trauma it struggles to avoid?  It is only, as Eisenstein argues, by remembering “structural” trauma as such (as “structural,” in a “transcendental” sense) that we can stop keeping on doing deadly repetitions/recollections of it in the form of “historical” trauma, acting the unacknowledged structural trauma out again and again.  Just so, to use an example that is of concern to Eisenstein himself, the contemporary Israeli oppression of the Palestinians can be seen as a re-enactment of the Holocaust itself, with new victims and with the old victims now become victimizers.

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Trauma, the Morality of Representation, Death, and Community

1/19/09

Coincidentally, in the same January 9, 2009, Sunday New York Times that contained Jacob Heilbrunn’s criticism of recent films depicting the Holocaust, which I discussed briefly in my last post, 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 last year from Random House.  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, surviving 18 members of his family, including his wife, her mother, and his own parents, all of whom died in the Nazi camps.  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 Adler’s book, written in German, we are told in the son’s afterword, during 1950-1951, itself had to take before it was finally published in Germany in 1962.  Even after publication, the book languished little-known and little-read until only recently, as indicated by an English translation only now becoming available for the first time.

In all three places, Richard Lourie’s review, Peter Filkins’s introduction, and  Jeremy Adler’s afterword, we are also 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.  Lourie and Filkins also connect Suhrkamp’s reaction with the dominance at the time of the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno, who famously declared that literature was no longer possible after Auschwitz, that the very idea of transforming such horror into fiction was blasphemous and obscene, to use the same terms I already used myself in my last post to characterize any “exploitation,” as Heilbrunn appropriately names it, of “Auschwitz”–of all that name has come to  stand for–for the sake of telling some tale of redemption.

Interestingly, H. G. Adler himself refuses to tell any such tale in The Journey.  At least that is how I read what he says in the opening pages of his book, which are all that I have so far managed to read of it myself, having purchased Filkins’s translation just a few days ago.  At any rate, to help contextualize the series of postings I have been making recently on this site–the series of entries made in my philosophical journal months ago, concerning the works of contemporary American historian Dominick LaCapra, who is himself very much concerned with such matters as concerned both Adorno and Adler–it will, I hope, be helpful  to the reader to know a little about how I stand in relation to what, for short, I will call the morality of fictionalized representations of the Holocaust/”Auschwitz.”

To put it as clearly and bluntly as I can, my own strong sense of the matter is that the risks of falling into blasphemy and obscenity grow greater, the less “fictional” and more “realistic” the representation–in a certain sense of “representation,” to which I will return in a moment–becomes.   Thus, as I see it, we are much nearer to the swamp of blasphemy and obscenity, if not already neck deep in it, in, say, Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, which presents itself as basically a “true story,” than we are in, say, the “imaginative,” “fictionalizing” reworkings of the material in a work such as I (so far, at least) take The Journey to be.

The sense of “representation” I have in mind in making such remarks is one in which “representing” means something such as “presenting in an image,” or “picturing.”  It is representation in a sense that ties the notion very directly and closely to that of an image, itself taken as essentially, or at least paradigmatically, visual.

For me, there is an important sense in which, to put the point hyperbolically, with regard to such things as Auschwitz the photo-graphic is the porno-graphic.  That is, the more closely the representing comes to what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction” (in his often-cited article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), as in the photographic image, 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.

Fully to articulate what I am struggling to  articulate with such formulations will require further efforts in future posts.  It will also require the context provided by my confrontations, in the philosophical journal entries I have been posting and will continue to post, with a variety of the issues involved.  That most surely includes the entries in my journal that address the works of LaCapra, which entries I have been posting here for the last few weeks. 

The post before this one, to which I gave the title “The Truth of Auschwitz,” contains the final entry from my philosophical journal occasioned directly by my reading of LaCapra’s works.  In the next entry from my journal, posted below, my focus shifts away from LaCapra and, for the time being at least, away from direct concern with the issue of representing trauma, especially the Holocaust.  Nevertheless, the matters that concern me in the entry below and that will  concern me in the coming posts continue to provide a context for further direct discussion of the issue of the representation of trauma, when it does resurface, as it will eventually for me in this blog.

Below is the next entry in my philosophical journal.

 

Monday, April 4, 2008

Various things:

1.  [Alain] Badiou, Logiques des Mondes (Paris:  Éditions du Seuil, 2006), p. 571, in note on IV.3.4, just after Derrida died [my translation]:  “Death, decidedly, always comes too soon.”

Comments:  Death is not only a trauma, even the one trauma we must all come to “sooner or later.”  Rather, it is the trauma.  It is what is traumatic in every trauma:  the revelation without mask of the face of death, as in Poe’s “Dance of the Red Death.”  And insofar as to become a human subject–if that expression is not pleonastic–is, as Heidegger has it, to be cast into being-toward-death, then death (as being-toward-death itself, as Heidegger insists) is the founding trauma of  the human subject as such.

The trauma of time:  the trauma which is time.

 

2.  In an excellent essay ["Notes on Trauma and  Community"] in  Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma:  Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), sociologist Kai Erikson distinguishes between what he [following two other researchers he cites] calls [p. 189] “corrosive communities” and “the ‘therapeutic communities’ so often noted in an earlier literature” about the way, after “natural disasters” like an earthquake, there comes a period of community drawing together in mutual support and aid.  In his “corrosive communities,” however, what happens is the opposite, and they emerge from “technological” rather than “natural” disasters–the key distinction.  Here, the disaster reveals and deepens the divisions within the community, as between the corporations responsible for the disaster but who deny all such responsibility finally, and the victims of it–in effect,though Erikson doesn’t say this himself, the trauma that gives rise to such a corrosive community is one in which the line between perpetrators and victims becomes crystal clear.  Yet the trauma–this is the point Erikson is making here–is still a founding one (not his term) for the community at issue.  Only now it is a riven, split, divided community.

Comment:  The truth that comes to  pass in a “technological” disaster that founds a “corrosive” community (where both or all sides of the divided parts of the community define themselves in terms of the traumatic event, from the date of that event on) is precisely the splitting of the given community into perpetrators (oppressor, dominant class) and victims–a splitting which has always already been there but did not yet, until the traumatic event, come to show its own face.

Accordingly, if that truth coming to pass in/as the traumatic “technological” disaster is  to be allowed to come to pass,the only way that can occur is by the restoration of justice, the healing of the rift between perpetrator and victim–better:  the redemption (in, e.g., Benjamin’s sense) of the victims.  And it is precisely the reaction of the  perpetrators not to let that happen–i.e., not to allow  comes to pass (that is here to say, what has come/comes/is coming now, here, on/as this date-event, as to pass, as demanding the emergence of its truth, the truth it is/reveals:  It has come/comes/is to come as to be allowed to pass).  The primary form of that reaction is to engender the false sense of community–to lay claim to the event as a trauma that “struck us all alike”–and in that process to reinforce the violence/oppression/perpetration and even to compound it, by denying the victims even the possibility of complaint, in effect, relegating them to a silence that, unlike the silence of Abraham in Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac, cannot even itself be voiced or heard.

So:  What, if any, truth comes to pass on 9/11?  What, if not precisely the truth the refusal of which the Bush reaction institutionalizes?  The refusal of the truth that America is not the victim here, but is, rather, the perpetrator?

A couple of pages later (pp. 193-196), Erikson notes how the victims (not his word) of such “technological” disasters often come together (in effect in their mutual  estrangement from the larger community wherein, know it or not, they are victims) for mutual support.  P. 194:  “They are not drawn together by feelings of affection . . . but by a shared set of perspectives and rhythms and words that derive from the sense of being apart.” As he goes on to note at the end of the next paragraph:  “. . . they can be said to have experienced not only a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others but a changed worldview.” 

So far, everything he says fits AA like a glove, though he says no such thing himself. However, he then goes on to characterize this new “worldview” that arises in the traumatized victims of refused (at the level  of the community as a whole and as run to satisfy the powers that be) trauma, as being characterized by a hyper-sensitivity and hyper-alertness to risk, etc.. 

Well, there the AA example presents a different possibility:  that of the creation of a new community “alongside” the corrosive one that just keeps on keeping on–a community in which all such hyper-vigilance can be and is let go, so that the community and its members can go on/go into, again or for the first time, their own lives, to live them, free of all such anxiety and constant, nagging insecurity, as the Big Book’s [that is, the book Alcoholics Anonymous's] talk of how “we” [i.e., such alcoholics in recovery] ”overcome our sense of economic insecurity,” which has nothing to do with “becoming financially secure.” 

AA, like Benedictine monasticism, is life itself lived in and as a community of equals. It is justice reigning.  Not, however, as even disruptive of the unjust pseudo-community alongside which life in AA/the monastery is lived, but, rather, as the reality to and for which the pseudo-community is dismissed as a phantom, as God dismisses such phantoms [when he wakes], in one of the stanzas of one of the repentance psalms.

The Truth of Auschwitz

1/16/09

The truth of Auschwitz is that there is no truth in Auschwitz.   Auschwitz is the place where there is no longer truth.

As I recall, it is Primo Levi who somewhere tells of an episode when he was an inmate at Auschwitz in which he or another prisoner asks why something or another is done.  The guard or capo (I can’t remember which, but it  does not matter for my purposes here) replies, “Here, there is no ‘why.’”  Auschwitz is the place where there is no why any longer; what gets  done, gets done, that’s  all.

By the same logic, Auschwitz is the place where “truth” vanishes.  Auschwitz is a sort of black hole where deceit, betrayal, and denial are so condensed and concentrated that no ray of truth can any longer break out from there, just as in an astronomical black hole matter is so condensed and concentrated, and the resulting gravity is so great, that no light, no sort of “information” at all, can any longer escape from it. 

Those reflections occurred to me when I read, last weekend, a commentary in the Sunday, January 9, 2009, New York Times by Jacob Heilbrunn, called “Telling the Holocaust Like It Wasn’t,” in which Heilbrunn critiques the rash of recently released films (Valkyrie, Defiance, The Reader, etc.) that all, in one way or another, concern ”Auschwitz,” that is, the Holocaust.  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.’”

Despite that opening, however, Heilbrunn begins the two paragraph closing of his commentary with the  following remark, which effectively takes back what he says in that opening passage.  “Perhaps,” he writes, “nothing came out of the Holocaust other than the determination  to prevent a repetition  of the  crimes.”

With such an ending Heilbrunn, despite himself one may assume, undercuts the very critique he would seem to want to advance, the heart of which can be found early on, right after he cites the scene from The Reader, where he writes that “the further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it’s being exploited to create a narrative of redemption.”  Yet that is, ironically, just what his own ending remarks then proceed to do, creating a redemption story of their own.

But if, as I put it to begin this post, only this time with emphasis added, the truth of Auschwitz is that there is no truth in Auschwitz–that Auschwitz is that place where there is no place for truth at all any longer–then any attempt, including Heibrunn’s  own, to tell a tale of any truth at all coming out of Auschwitz, becomes unacceptable.  To tell any such tale, including his own, becomes blasphemous and obscene, an exploitation, to use one of  Heilbrunn’s own  terms, of what is never to be exploited.

My hope is that the preceding remarks will help to contextualize the entry from my philosophical journal given below, an entry which continues my reflections on the works of Dominick LaCapra, especially, for the last few posts as well as for this one, his book Representing the Holocaust.

 

Saturday, March 29, 2008

LaCapra, Representing, p. 73, on [former President] Reagan’s 1985 trip [with then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl] to Bitburg cemetery [where many German soldiers, including many SS members, are buried, in what was then West Germany]:  “Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan were at one in attempting to ‘emancipate’ Germany from what they saw as a debilitating memory.  In Reagan’s case, the notion of emancipation was tantamount to  unearned, celebratory forgetting that invited the return of the repressed.  It simply ignored the  problems of public acknowledgement, mourning, and working-through.”  Then, [he writes, on] p. 74:  “. . .Reagan misconstrues the process whereby one can achieve a condition that allows one to let bygones be bygones, and he does not address the possibility that a viable and legitimate democracy cannot be based on celebratory oblivion but requires a critical attempt to come to  terms with the past.”

This analysis applies as well to the Bush administration’s orchestrating of the American reaction (["reaction,"] not “response,” I  might add) to 9/11/2001.  Except the analogy would, in that case of 9/11 and the Bitburg incident, be between Bush  and Kohl, rather than between Bush and Reagan.  That is, the atrocities which are being consigned [by Bush after 9/11] to a convenient (for whom? one should ask) oblivion–in the immediate casting of everything in the language of good and evil, and all  the rest of the baggage of the “war on terror”–were those perpetrated by the US itself, just as the Nazi atrocities Kohl was glad to join Reagan in assigning to oblivion were committed by Germany itself.

Still, on p. 74, LaCapra goes on to quote Regan’s response to the discovery that Bitburg included graves of SS men.  Reagan, in the New York Times of April 19, 1985, is  quoted as saying:  “. . . these young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in German uniforms, drafted to serve to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazi’s.  They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

As LaCapra rightly bemoans, Reagan here conflates crucial distinctions between victims and perpetrators, and the mixed cases, as it were, in between.  He does not mention, though I’m sure  he’d agree, how Reagan also conflates the distinction between the SS and the regular German military, as well as that between the concentration camps and the extermination camps.

More important, to  me, is  that one can see structural similarities again here between the Bitburg episode and the Bush reaction to 9/11.  For one thing, the Bush reaction conflates the distinction between those who died in the Twin Towers as a result of the attacks on 9/11, and who were certainly in the obvious sense “victims” of that strike/attack, but who themselves had varying degrees of complicity in the destruction brought about by US policies and acts over the years(just as the German camp administrators from Camp Commandant to Kapos and Sondercommandos, had varying degrees of complicity in the Nazi camps), [with those victims who had no such complicity] .  In that sense, [University of Colorado professor Ward] Churchill’s remarks that the Twin Towers victims were “little Eichmanns” is  not off the  mark entirely, overstated as it may be–even offensively so. 

It seems to me Churchill himself is conflating, at least at the level of his rhetoric, a distinction between perpetrators as such (which Eichmann was) and accomplices, and then conflating important distinctions between different levels of complicity among the latter (accomplices).  Considered in general, the  victims of the collapse of/attack on the Twin Towers could not unreasonably be categorized as active accomplices, insofar as they helped administer the sub-structural mechanisms of  the  march of global capitalism.  Their analogue in Nazi Germany might be, for example, the workers in the chemical plants that produced the Zyklon B eventually used, by those who at that point in the system come closer to being perpetrators (or go all the way to it), to  exterminate Jews in the extermination camps.

As for other [categories of] victims of  9/11 in New York, we might take the rescue forces–firemen, police, health-care workers, etc.–who died in the aftermath of the strike of the two planes into the Twin Towers.  This category of the victims of 9/11 cannot necessarily be regarded as accomplices of American violence worldwide.  Rather, they are like what American military euphemism calls “collateral damage.”

That category marked by the US military euphemism would also include “innocent bystanders”–that is, those who were neither cogs in the engines of global capitalism (the majority of workers in the Towers), nor actively self-involving rescuers and helpers to  those caught in the destruction, but were merely “accidentally” present at the time–e.g., tourists visiting the World Trade Center, or delivery people, etc..  They (such innocent bystanders) would be analogous, I’d say, to the mass of the population of Dresden subjected to the Allied fire-bombing of  that city in WW II.

That last analogy also brings me to one more:  the attack on 9/11 by militant Arabs is analogous, it seems to me, to the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies.  To the degree there is such an analogy between the two, to that degree whatever moral reservations or judgments apply to  the 9/11 attacks applies just as much to the fire-bombing of Dresden (or to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for  that matter).  And to the exact degree the bombing of Dresden was justifiable, so  would the attack on the Twin Towers be.

LaCapra, Continued

1/14/09

My philosophical journal continues with further reflection on Dominick LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust:  History, Theory, Trauma (Cornell University Press, 1994).

 

Friday, March 28, 2008

LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, pp. 28-29:   “One sign of a science is that it no  longer reads its canonical authors.  To put it another way, it does not have a textual  canon or even competing canons.  It has relatively autonomous theories, textbooks, and problems . . .  Hence, a contemporary physicist need not read Newton or Einstein.”

Here, LaCapra’s use of the term ‘science’ could benefit from him displaying some of the very things he foregrounds in his  own discussions of historiography–mainly, it could benefit from a bit of historical “contextualization,” to use his term, of his own text, in its usage of ‘science.’

Clearly, the usage he has of that word in the above lines is  wholly uninformed and uninforming, so to speak, about the historically limited restriction of the correct use of “science” to cases such as he describes.  That is, what he says is true only if we fall uncritically into the modern equation of science with what Husserl, for example, calls “the exact/mathematical natural sciences,” of which modern physics is the model, as in LaCapra’s own text above.

With regard to the limits, however, of any such “contextualization,” a passage from LaCapra a few pages later [p.35] is insightful:  “If a text could be totally contextualized, it would paradoxically be ahistorical, for it would exist in a stasis in which it made no difference whatsoever. . . . If contextualization were fully explanatory, texts would be derivative items in which nothing new of different happened.”

Put paradoxically:  A completely historizing contextualization would miss the historical dimension of what is being contextualized.

Those LaCapra’s own usage [it  seems to me] moves [too] uncritically between the two senses, what his lines, especially in my paradoxical rewording, bring out is two very different, but complexly interrelated, uses of the very terms ‘history,’ ‘historical,’ and the like:

1. “History” as “times past,” and
2. “History” as happening, as event, which is the past that, to use
   Faulkner’s formula,not only “isn’t over yet,” but that ”isn’t even past.”

A stab at some formulations of my own:

What is historical about any given phenomenon–”text,” “artifact,”occurrence”–is what in it “contextualizes” everything else.

In that same way/sense, art, the artwork, is historical:  It creates–draws forth and draws–context.  (Does that provide a way of rethinking Heidegger’s notion of art as the setting-itself-into-work of truth–a way of rethinking his notion that comes after and incorporates [Phillipe] Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique in [La fiction du politique:  Heidegger, l'art et la politique (Christian Bourgeois éditeur, 1987)]?  That is, might Heidegger be read to strip him of all mimetic trappings, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s sense, so that the “founding” movement in and as art is no longer thought as the provision of a copy/model, a model to be copied?  Might even the notion of fiction be recast along such lines?  So that the fictive/making/creative becomes the (re)contextualization of contextuality itself, in effect?)

Trauma and Representation: More in Response to LaCapra

1/12/09

The title I have given to today’s post is enough of an introduction to the following entry from my journal.  I will only add here, as a side comment, that my own reading of the Augustinian (if not so much of the so called “Gnostic”) tradition sees far less of what LaCapra,  in a passage cited in the entry below, calls “extreme world-negating, ascetic, transcendental Christianity” than he seems to.  Eventually, I will have a bit more to say about that particular issue in some entries I plan to share in future posts.

 

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Working now back to LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust:  History, Theory, Trauma, of 1994.  Read chapter on Heidegger and the Nazi’s before going back to start of book.

Preface(p. xi):  “The Holocaust has been both repressed and ‘canonized’ in the recent past . . .”  Even his own later thought (if not in this work itself) suggests that the two go together:  the canonization is a way of repressing.

In the chapter, “Heidegger’s Nazi Turn” (pp. 137-168), with which I tend to be in overall agreement [concerning what he says on the question of Heidegger's relations with the Nazis], despite disagreement on some small specific points [on that same, limited matter], LaCapra does already in this work what I criticize under [item #]1 in my entry [given in my immediately preceding post, put up on January 7, two days ago] for Easter Sunday, March 23, above, when he writes:  “In addition,  this indiscriminate form of ‘culture critique’ [which he thinks he finds in Being and Time] is reinforced or  doubled by the uncritical role of secularized and displaced Christian motifs whose provenance and precise nature are not thematized as a problem–motifs such as fallenness, originary guilt, the  call of conscience, and the everyday as the locus of divertisement.  In this respect the text often reads like an evacuated secular version of extreme world-negating, ascetic, transcendental Christianity in the Augustinian (if not the Gnostic) tradition.”

There are a lot of problems in what he says here, including under-recognition of how openly, taking his  whole work, Heidegger acknowledges perfectly consciously his own provenance in  Augustine, Paul, etc.  But above all I’m citing it [that is, citing LaCapra's passage above] for reinforcement of the  point I made in that earlier, Easter entry:  LaCapra fails to  see and explore the possibility of reading these “secularized” Christian elements of Heidegger’s thought, not as “displaced,” but as brought to  clarity and  fulfilled only in such “secularization.”  LaCapra, here at least, shows no familiarity with what Heidegger says about the relationship between “phenomenology” and “theology” in his earlier works [by which I here in my journal mean the lecture courses he gave at Freiburg and Marburg even before the publication of Being and Time in 1927] and the lecture “Phenomenology and Theology” [given after the appearance of Being and Time].

Later, however, to cite something I think is much  nearer the mark, LaCapra (pp. 161-162) suggests reading Heidegger’s thoughts on “resoluteness,” “repetition,” and “moment of vision” in terms of Freud’s contrast of working-through vs. acting-out:  “The moment of vision in this sense would be a certain kind of repetition in the face of trauma and the uncanny anxiety it brings.”

He’s on the money there, I think.

Items Concerning LaCapra’s Works #2

1/09/09

The following entry from my philosophical journal continues with what the entry from my last post started:  presentation of some separate, though still interrelated, musings on some of Dominick LaCapra’s works.

 

Sunday, March 23, 2008–Easter

(1)  At various places in History and Memory After Auschwitz, LaCapra writes of “secularization” as “a process of displacement involving at times a return of the repressed,” with what gets repressed–and, therefore, compulsively re-enacted time after time–being “religious” in nature.  Most especially, he sees such repression as is at play in, for example, the Nazi projection of and upon “the Jew” in terms of the return of religious sacrifice and scape-goating, with the victimization at play in the religious yoking of those two, the sacrifice and the scapegoat.

Yet might one not think secularization not as the repression of religion but rather as its liberation–releasing it into its truth, precisely by stripping religious notions such as “sacrifice” from their idolatrous formations?

Bonheoffer, Vattimo, and Girard?

Religion as the repression of trauma (see, e.g., Freud’s story of the primal horde and the murder of the father) and secularization as the sublimation of that trauma?  The “sacrifice” of the Christian mass read, a la Girard, as itself a milestone on the road of such sublimation–in that the Eucharist transforms the exclusion of scape-goating to the inclusion of the sharing of the body and blood of Christ as transformed (“trans-substantiated”) into bread and wine?

 

(2)  At more than one place (e.g., p. 69, pp. 204-205) in History and Memory After Auschwitz LaCapra argues that “not everyone deserves” (p. 69) to be mourned, “not everyone is deserving” (p. 204) of the “gift”of mourning–or, accordingly, even “a proper burial” (!).

Goodness!

The wisdom of AA, for one example, is that to mourn or grieve something [or someone] does not entail one is not glad to be rid of what [or even who] one mourns or grieves.  Even when an addict wants, embraces, and luxuriates in letting “the habit” go, there can be a grief and mourning to go through for that very “habit,” and for oneself as addict.

LaCapra might be able to learn something here from AA.

Items Concerning LaCapra’s Works #1

1/07/09

In the entry below from my philosophical journal, as in those for my next few postings, I continue my exploration of works by contemporary American historian and trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra.  Both today’s entry and the one I will post next contain a series of related but independent, separate numbered items pertaining to various  aspects of his thought.

 

Saturday, March 22, 2008

(1)  The use of the Holocaust as what LaCapra calls a “founding trauma”–e.g., as used too often by Israel–does not honor the debt all of us alive after the Holocaust owe to the dead.

 

(2)  LaCapra ([History and Memory] After Auschwitz, p. 166) quotes Art Spiegelman [comic-strip artist, winner of the Pulitzer Prise for his two-volume Holocaust comic-strip classic  Maus] in an interview on the Poles who witnessed the Holocaust:  “The Poles were the victimized witnesses.”

That notion, of “victimized witness,” is useful.  It covers all witnesses to abuse, from those who try to do something to stop the abuse, to those who are gleeful in watching it.  Just to witness abuse is, as such, itself traumatizing.  That, I  think, is the deep  truth in what Spiegelman says–in the concept he formulates in his remark.

 

(3)  La Capra comes (After Auschwitz, pp. 182-183) close to saying what I would about “false memory syndrome”:  “Here ‘recovered memory syndrome’ is not a pathology. . . . It is rather a subcase or even a metonymic exemplar of a larger problem concerning the difficulties of memory with respect to traumatic events…”

He does not go quite as far as I would, which would be to argue that all memory is traumatic, and to combine that with the double sense I’ve used [before, in earlier posted entries from my philosophical journal] of “screen” memories, whereby they (1) mask/cover at the time time–indeed, as such “masks/covers” of what cannot be masked as such–that they (2) become the “surface” (screen) upon which the trauma projects itself (in and as the image).

Memory is always symbolic!

 

(4) LaCapra comes very close (p. 187 [of same book]) to what, following Eisenstein, I would also say about what such disasters as the Holocaust come from:  “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.”  He gives the figure of the Jew in German culture as an example.

 

(5)  LaCapra (p. 195 [same book]):  “. . . historical events of the seismic nature and magnitude of the Holocaust may, in transgressing a theoretical limit, pose a challenge to the distinction [between structural and historical trauma, with the former defined earlier in this paragraph as "the condition of possibility that generates a potential for  trauma"]:  the structural (or existential-transcendental) seems to crash down into the empirical.  Thus [it can come to serve in effect] as an index of God’s intention in history,” or the like.

Might this not be because catastrophes such as the Holocaust arise from  an idolatrous identification of the traumatic, which is as such a structural, transcendental, existential  birth of the historical, empirical, [and] individual, with one instance of that which it so makes possible, with, that is, an isolable, historical “this” such as “the Jew”?