Trauma Time #3: Dead Time (droning on)

Only the postponed can truly be pending, and only the pending postponed.  The postponed and the pending interpenetrate one another.  To postpone is precisely to set (in Latin, ponere, to place or put or set, as one sets a brush on a dressing-table) after (post in Latin).  What is postponed is put off till later, till after whatever may come before then, whatever comes along to fill the gap created by the postponement.

As Peter Sloterdijk writes in the first line of “Rage as Project:  Revenge,” a section of “Rage Transactions,” the first chapter of his Rage and Time:  A Psychopolitical Investigation (translated by Mario Wenning, New York:  Columbia University Press, 2010):  “The creation of a qualified or existential time, that is, a lived time with a retrospective and anticipatory character, occurs through the deferral of discharge.”  It may be that, as Sloterdijk’s remark suggests when re-contextualized into the general argument of his book, the “rage” of his title may play a special role in the original opening up of  “existential” or “lived” time, as he calls it.  However, even if what Sloterdijk’s calls rage does somehow, for whatever “psychopolitical” reasons, take precedence in that regard over such other fundamental passions or emotions as, say, the anxiety or the boredom to which Heidegger assigns a similar role, it is because Sloterdijk’s rage, no less than Heidegger’s anxiety or boredom, itself has a traumatic structure.

Rage–and the spirit of revenge with which Sloterdijk, following Nietzsche, quite properly connects it—can arise only from the “deferral of discharge” to which Sloterdijk refers in the remark I have just cited.  That deferral, in turn, is ultimately imposed, at least at the “existential” or “lived” level, to use Sloterdijk’s own terms—which is to say, as actually experienced by anyone “overcome,” as we tellingly put it, by the rage that springs up of itself, from the deferral at issue.  Indeed, as Nietzsche well knew, rage might be defined precisely as what wells up of itself in the organism whenever that organism encounters an obstacle to the discharge of any charge (that is, any pulse, impulse, urge, drive, instinct, energy, or the like, anything whatever that would seek to “discharge” itself in the first place), an obstacle imposing a deferral or postponement of such discharge.  The organism will experience any such obstacle as a thwarting of the organism’s will, as it were.  In turn, the thwarted will is the enraged will.  Encountering an obstacle to its own will, the will rages–and rage it will, like Achilles on the plains before Troy.

Nor, as Sloterdijk’s title for his book shows he also is happy to acknowledge, was Nietzsche ignorant of what it is that the enraged will really rages at.  The very spirit of revenge, as he has his Zarathustra say, is (in Walter Kaufman’s well known translation) “the will’s ill-will” against time—“against time,” he says, “and its ‘It was!’”  From the point of view of rage, what’s so objectionable about time, so enraging about it, is expressed precisely by the past tense, the tense of that which is no longer subject to alteration, no longer malleable to the will.  The will can work upon the present to change the future, but what has already been, the past itself, is no longer anything that can be changed.  In its very being past, the past thus places itself past the reach of the will.  The past as such, in its simple past-ness and altogether independent of its actual contents, which may be wholly pleasing to the will, wholly according to its will, defies the will, thwarts it.

What is more, for a thwarted will, in its enraged frustration, time as a whole, the whole business of “past, present, and future,” manifests itself as nothing more than the inexorable mechanism of turning everything into something that “was.”  Time as such manifests to rage as nothing more than the ever more enraging, ever ongoing, never changing, never changeable transformation of everything into the past, into what “was,” but which, precisely as what was, is what still is now and ever will be the one absolutely insuperable limit to the will.  So experienced, time is, in effect, a vast engine for devouring everything it touches, all it brings forth—all its children, as Chronos, old Father Time, devours his children in Greek mythology—and turning it all into the pure waste of what is, for the will, deserving only of being discarded, cast away as a useless remnant, what remains after the will has taken all it can from it.  For rage, then, there is no need to wait for Auschwitz and Adorno, time itself has always already turned everything into excrement.

Nietzsche can also offer guidance concerning just what rage itself contributes to the very process against which it rages so—the very process of the primordial timing of time as such, the original-originating “temporalization of temporality,” in the language of Heidegger’s Being and Time.  “The spirit of revenge,” of which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra speaks—that spirit of revenge “against time and its “It was!”—is also, he says, “the will’s ill-will against itself.”  As Heidegger, for one, is good at elucidating in his own Nietzsche interpretations, it is, in effect, the will itself that drives time, that propels and sustains the chronological machine of time, that machine that makes time pass into the past and its “was,” turning everything into shit, so far as the will is concerned, at least.  The will itself is that very machine.  It is the clock itself, in its very  ticking, obscene in the inexorability with which it keeps counting off the moments as they click by from what is not yet, through what is, but, unable to abide, no sooner is than it is gone on by, to become the pure waste of what once was, but as such is no longer.

The will as such is, for Nietzsche, no mere will to preserve itself, as though it were Spinoza’s conatus, the striving of any being to maintain itself at its present level, which eventually becomes, in Freud, the death-drive whereby the organic defines itself in and as the striving to return to the inorganic.   If the will were any such thing, then it would not be pure will.  It would be, instead, the will to the very thing, whatever it may be (even if nothing), that stills the will—that satisfies it, satiates it, brings it to cease its striving, its willing.  No, the will as will is no such will to put the will at rest.  It is, rather, the will always to keep willing, the will never to be satisfied, the will to will itself.  (As Lacan a century after Nietzsche will observe, above all what desire desires, is to desire.  That is why desire is never satisfied, never has “enough.”  Or, as Norman Mailer around the same time as Lacan will observe, in regard to sex and money:  Only too much is enough.)

Thus, Nietzsche insists that the will is always the will to increase itself, to subject ever more to its own will, its own power.  The will as will is just that, the will to power.   Furthermore, as Heidegger especially emphasizes in his interpretations of Nietzsche, as will to power the will as such is always will to more power.  Otherwise, it would once again become a will that wills to be brought to rest, a will that wills to stop willing.  The insatiability of the will to power is just that:  insatiability itself.

Accordingly, it is the will itself, as insatiable will to power, the very will to will, that condemns everything that is—condemns it, precisely, to pass on.  The will to power itself judges every “now” as deserving to pass, to get out of the way so the will can keep on going, keep on willing.  By announcing that sentence of condemnation, the will enacts the very sentence being pronounced:  The will is just that “speech-act,” the “performative” utterance of the curse of all that is, which utterance as such effects the very cursing, the consigning of what is to its doom.  The will as such passes the very sentence that sentences everything to pass—to turn to shit, against the stench of which the will itself recoils.  However, no more than one can recoil from one’s own shadow, which continues to shadow one in the very recoil, can the will succeed in escaping the stench of the past from which it recoils.  It is, indeed, that very recoil itself that passes the past behind it, as the bowel passes the waste it is designed to pass by spasmodically recoiling itself away from it.

Rage is the form the will itself takes as the recoil that passes the very sentence in the pronouncing of which the very impassable form of passing itself (as Husserl taught time to be in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness) gets enacted.  Yet unless the will pronounces such a sentence, it is no will at all.  To will is to pronounce that sentence.  Thus, the will’s rage–the burning rage of the will’s spirit of revenge against time and its “It was!”—is rage against itself, the “will’s ill-will against itself,” as Nietzsche has his Zarathustra also say.

Furthermore, insofar as time or temporality temporalizes itself into the very passing of the sentence of what passes on to passing on, time itself is rage.

According to one of Heidgger’s famous analyses in Being and Time, the emotion, mood, or attunement (Befindlichkeit) of what he calls anxiety (Angst) temporalizes itself into and as the adventing of advent, the coming-to of the to-come (the authentic “future,” German Zukunft), that retrieves or repeats what has been (das Gewesene, the authentic past) in the bare blink of an eye (the authentic moment, now, or present:  Augenblick, which the old, standard English translation of Being and Time by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson renders as “moment of vision”).  So too, according to Heidegger, does every “state-of-mind” (MacQuarrie and Robinson’s translation of Heidegger’s German term Befindlichkeit) temporalize itself in one way or another—and, crucially, always as a version either of authentic time, or of inauthentic time, but either way “simultaneously” in all three of time’s dimensions.

Just so does the state of mind called rage, too, temporalize itself.  Indeed, read as the very spirit of what Nietzsche calls revenge, rage, like what Heidegger calls anxiety, is not just one way among others in which temporality temporalizes itself, but is, instead, a form of fundamental temporalization.  Rage, conceived along Nietzschean lines, is like Heideggerian anxiety in being what Heidegger will soon enough after Being and Time come to call a “fundamental mood” or “fundamental attunement”–a Grundstimmung.

However, whereas in the case of the fundamental attunement that is anxiety, time times itself authentically, the time of rage—the temporality that temporalizes itself in and as rage, taken as an alternate fundamental attunement—is inauthentic time.  It is dead time—and as such it is also always deadening time:  that time of the clock that always keeps ticking, time as the never passing, un-transformable, everything-deadening deadness of the very form of passing itself, Nietzsche’s rage-inducing time of “It was!”

As deadening dead time, the enraging time of rage, time has no time for itself.  It is time as what kills the time that stretches itself so monotonously from now till later, the time that kills the time that must be killed until what’s still pending, what has been put off until later–that “later” that never seems to come– finally does come “at last,” after all the endlessly dead and deadening time of passing on has finally itself passed on.

 

The Sovereignty of the Image #9: Screen Memory (concluded)

A lesson from Heidegger that we can profitably apply is that the very distinction between what, following him and Gass, I have been calling “ontic” and “ontological” is one to which the masking of that very distinction, the confusing of the two, a confusion wherein the ontic and the ontological keep getting mixed up with one another, is itself essential to the very distinction—in the active or verbal sense of actually distinguishing, of drawing or accomplishing the task of differentiating between the one and the other—itself.  That is, the only way in which the distinction–now in the nominal sense–between the two can get drawn is in setting underway the ongoing struggle to sort the one out from the other, a struggle that can never end, without simply eradicating all distinction whatever.

That, in turn, allows me to return to the passage from Mark Taylor that I cited before (from page 119 of his book After God):   “The present, understood both temporally and spatially, is always gift or present pre-sent by (the) nothing that is (not) present.”  Significantly, a few lines later Taylor draws the connection between this idea of a unique absence that alone makes presence itself possible, but only in such a way that such absence continues always to disrupt the presence of any present, with the idea of representation and the unrepresentable.  Observing that what can never be present, as that absence definitive of presence can never be, also cannot, for that very reason, be represented (that is, literally, re-presented—what cannot ever be present in the first place can hardly be presented again), Taylor concludes that representation itself “includes, as a condition of its possibility, ‘something’ that remains irreducibly urepresentable.”  Then he draws a connection that is especially important for my present purposes:  “Expressed in terms of figuration:  inasmuch as figuring can never be figured, every figure is always disfigured as if from within.”

“Figuring,” in the sense at issue in Taylor’s remark, is the sketching or projecting of something in a figure.  It means, then, in that sense, representing in an image, a “representation” in the nominative sense.  We can thus rephrase Taylor to say that, since representing as such can never be represented, every representation (that is, every image) is always mis-represented “as if from within.”

This disfiguration in every figure, which is to say the misrepresentation in every representation, “as if from within,” points to the key relationship between trauma and figure–that is, representation, or image.  In brief, the relationship between the two is such that every trauma, every traumatic event, as such, projects itself into and as some representation, some figure or image, that, precisely as such a projection, simultaneously both discloses and hides the very event so projected.   To take place at all, a traumatic event must project itself in a representation, a figure or image.  Yet that representation, that figure or image, cannot but cover over and conceal the very same event, denying it any place to take.

Riven by the Freudian belatedness definitive of it, trauma never “presents” itself.  Instead of ever “presenting” itself, trauma can only “re-present itself,”  in a sense related to, but different from, Taylor’s use of that term.  It can only present itself “again,” yet without every having presented itself for a “first time.”  To be trauma, it can never present itself “in person,” but, rather, can only present itself through a “representation,” in the sense of an image or figure, that functions as a “representative” in the sense of a “stand in,” someone or something that “stands for” some other one or thing in some aspect or relation, to borrow Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of a “sign.”

Furthermore, any such representation functions as an archive in which what has figured, sketched, or traced itself there—left a trace of itself there—is preserved, and from which it can be recalled by activating that archive, that trace.   Any representation or figure in which trauma projects itself is just such a trace.  As such, it is a memory of the trauma that traces itself in and into that image or figure.

However, insofar as any such representation or figure always necessarily misrepresents or disfigures what it represents or figures, it is always a covering over and hiding of what it represents or figures.   Consequently, every such memory image wherein trauma projects itself is of necessity simultaneously a “cover-memory.”   In short every such memory of trauma is a “screen memory.”

Any representational image or figure in which trauma so projects and traces itself serves that same archiving function.  The photographic accuracy of the representation does not matter.  That is, whether the memory is “true” or “false” is unimportant.  Indeed, if anything, the more photographically accurate the memory of a trauma may be, the greater becomes its potential to keep attention focused on itself, and to confuse trauma with its own figure or image—a sort of idolatry of the sign.

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.

Lyotard, Heidegger, the Jews, and “the jews”–#3

7/24/09

Below is the third and final entry from my philosophical journal addressing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews”. After beginning to reread Lyotard’s book in January of this year, other things intervened, such that I did not return to it for two months–hence the date below, slightly more than two months after the entry I posted here just two days ago.

After concluding my remarks on my rereading of Lyotard’s book, in the entry below I go on to consider a critique of his thought about trauma and representation by fellow French philosopher Jacques Rancière.  What I say below is by no means my final word on Jacques Rancière’s critique, but it shows the extent to which, at the date of the entry, I had been able to think through some of the important issues he raises.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

For the last day or two I’ve gone back to Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews”, which I started reading back in January, reading through the first of the two parts of the book, “the jews,” before putting  it down to go on to other things that needed my attention.  Well, now I’ve gone back and reread “the jews” yet again, then went on to “Heidegger,” the second part of the book.

In going again through the first half of the book called “the jews,” I hit upon a couple of additional passages worth noting down in this journal–additional to what I put down back in January.  Here they are:

P. 10:  “Here [in the case of the Holocaust] to fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that  one  forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for  certain.  It means to fight against forgetting the precariousness of what has been established, of the reestablished past; it is a fight for the sickness whose recovery is simulated.”  Thus, for trauma as for addiction, genuine recovery is the refusal of any pretense of recovery, which is to say the refusal of any claim to be cured.  In terms of the injunction “never forget,” it is precisely to refuse to countenance the idea that it is possible to remember, in the sense of “remembering” being equated with keeping a memento or memorial, in general a representation, present before one.

Then, from section 6, two passages, the first on p.19:

Whatever the invoked sense [of primal trauma, as it were--e.g., Freud's "primal scene"] might be, in the night of  time, of the individual or of the species, this scene that has not taken place, that has not had a stage, that has not even been, because it is not representable [Note how, here, he clearly qualifies what he is saying:  If to be = to be represented, vorgestellt, then trauma cannot "be"] but which is, and is ex-, and will remain it whatever representations, qualifications one might make of it, with which one might endow it; this event ek-sists inside, in-sisting, as what exceeds every imaginative, conceptual, rational sequence.

Then, next page (20):

It follows that psychoanalysis, the search for lost time, can only be interminable, like literature and like true history (i.e., the one that is not historicism but anamnesis):  the kind of  history that does not forget that forgetting is not a breakdown of memory but the immemorial always “present” but never here-now, always torn apart in the time of consciousness, of chronology, between a too early and a too late–the too early of a first blow to the apparatus that it does not feel, and the too late of a second blow where something intolerable is felt.  A soul struck without striking a blow.

Now, on to the second part of the book, “Heidegger.”

P, 51-52 (first two pages of 2nd part), invoking “another urgency,” namely, one other than that manufactured by “the politics of publishing” [at play in "the Heidegger affair"--the agitation over Heidegger's Nazi connections that was especially disruptive in French intellectual circles in the 1980s]:

Thought can be “urgent”; indeed, this urgency is essential to its being.  One is urged or pressured to think because something, an event, happens before one is able to think it. This event is not the “sensational.”  Under the guise of the sensational, it is forgotten [as 9/11 was forgotten precisely in and under the immediate, even simultaneous, sensationalization of it].  In any case, the event does not “present” itself, it will have happened:  thought finds itself seized and dispossessed by it according to its possibility as regards the indeterminate; it realizes its lack of preparedness for what will have come about, it understands its state of infancy.  The Heidegger affair will have come to our thought in such a way; it will have found it unprepared despite denials on both sides.  The urgency to investigate it when it is prescribed by the publishing powers is a way of precipitating its closure or classification.  In claiming that thought is unprepared for the affair I am eager to maintain its urgency and its pressure, to leave it open to the most patient questioning.

In effect, then, “the Heidegger affair” is a trauma for thought/philosophy.  What is more, isn’t that “historical” trauma traumatic for thought precisely because it crystallizes–becomes a site [for the striking of]–the “structural” trauma that births thought itself in the first place, thought itself as always traumatically structured?  And, ultimately, isn’t the urge and urgency that first calls thought forth–isn’t that the urge and urgency to think trauma?

For Lyotard, “the jews” is just the name of that trauma, the trauma that calls forth thought, to be thought.  And what of the thought of such thought?  P. 84:

This thought has never told anything but stories of unpayable debt, transmitted little narratives, droll and disastrous, telling of the insolvency of the indebted soul.  Where the Other has given credence without the command to believe, who promised without anyone ever asking anything, the Other who awaits its due.  There is no need to wait for or believe in this Other.  The Other waits and extends credit.  One is not acquitted of its patience or its impatience by counteroffereings, sacrifices, representations, and philosophical elaborations.  It is enough to tell and retell that you believe you are acquitting yourself and that you are not.  Thus one remembers (and this  must suffice) that one never stops forgeting what must not be forgotten, and that one is not quit either just because one does not forget the debt. . . . It is this, then, . . . that Nazism has tried to definitively forget:  the debt, the difference between good and evil.  It had tried to unchain the soul from this  obligation, to tear up the note of credit, to render debt-free forever.  And this unchaining is evil itself.

Like the debt we owe to the dead (if it is not the very same debt), the debt to God/the Other is in principle unpayable; and it is  the very endeavor to pay off this debt that compunds it most.

Pp. 93-94 (last page of the book):

[T]he debt that is our only lot–the lot of forgetting neither that there is the Forgotten nor what horrors the spirit is capable of in its headlong madness to make us forget the fact.  “Our” lot?  Whose lot?  It is the lot of this nonpeople of survivors, Jews and non-Jews, called here “the jews,” whose Being-together depends not on the  authenticity of any primary roots but on that singular debt of interminable anamnesis.

The (non-)people or (non-)community of all those who have nothing in common save that each is alone in his/her own unpayable debt.

Also, I just recently read Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott (London and New York:  Verso, 2007–Fr. orig. 2003).  The last chapter (#5), “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” is, in large part, a critique of Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews”.  I’ll begin with the summary with which he [Rancière] ends his essay, and therewith the whole book.  Pp. 136-137:

I shall conclude briefly with my opening question.  Some things are unrepresentable as a function of the conditions to which a subject of representation must submit if it is to be part of a determinate regime of art, a specific regime of the relations between exhibition and signification. . . . This set of conditions exclusively defines the representative regime in art. . . . If there are things which are unrepresentable, they can be located in this regime.  In our regime–the aesthetic [as opposed to the representative] regime in art–this notion has no determinable content,  other than the pure notion of discrepancy with  the representative regime.  It expresses the absence of a stable relationship between exhibition and signification.  But this maladjustment tends towards more representation, not less. . . .

Anti-representative art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things.  There are no longer any inherent limits to representation, to its possibilities.  This boundlessness also means that there is no longer a language form which is appropriate to a subject, whatever it might be.  This lack of appropriateness runs counter both to credence in a language peculiar to art and to the affirmation of the irreducible singularity of certain events. . . . I have tried to show that this exaggeration itself merely perfects the system of rationalization it claims to denounce. . . . In order to assert an unrepresentability in art that is commensurate with an unthinkability of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely neccary according to thought.  The logic of unrepresentability can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.

With that general summary laying out what he is arguing overall, I’ll now go back to flesh it out a bit at a few places.

P. 126:  “There is no appropriate language for wintessing.  Where testimony has to express the experience of the inhuman, it naturally finds an already constituted language of becoming-inhuman, of an identity between human sentiments and non-human movements.”  He then gives a (very good) analysis of Lanzmann’s Shoah in terms of just how it makes use of such already available cinematic language to accomplish its tasks.  On the basis of that analysis of a prime example, he  then concludes (p. 129):  “Nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event.”  I’m not sure whoever said it was, really.  And, anyway, it all depends on what one means by “the event” here.  If one means simple “datable occurrence,” then “event” itself is cut down to representational size, in effect, before one even begins.  At any rate, he continues:

There are simply choices.  The choice for the present as against historicization; the  decision to represent an accounting of the means, the materiality of the process, as opposed to the representation of causes.  The causes that render the event resistant to any explanation by a principle of sufficient reason, be it fictional or documentary, must be left on hold.

. . . And Lanzmann’s investigation is part of a cinemtaic tradition that has established its pedigree.  This is the tradition that counter-poses to the light thrown on the blinding of Oedipus the simultaneously solved and unresolved mystery of Rosebud, which is the “reason” for Kane’s madness, the revelation at the end of the investigation, beyond investigation, of the nullity of the “cause”. . . . A form of investigation that reconstructs the materiality of an event while  leaving its cause on hold, proves suitable to the extraordinary character of the Holocaust without being specific to  it.  Here again the  appropriate form is also an inappropriate form.  In and of itself the event neither prescribes nor proscribes any artistic means.  And it does not impose any duty on art to represent, or not to represent, in some particular way.

I’m not quite sure what to make of his critique.  On its own terms, his analysis is illuminating, I think.  But as a critique of views such as Lyotard’s,  it seems to me basically to fail.  It passes Lyotard by, as it were.  What it attacks is not what Lyotard is saying, so far as I can see.  For instance, Lyotard himself says that something such as the Holocaust can be more effectively erased by being represented than by being simply denied.  Well, that makes sense only insofar as one can represent the Holocaust.  But his point is that trauma disrupts and disconnects the very business of “representation,” undercutting its claim to any sort of mastery, as it were.

As I say, I’m just not yet sure what to do with Rancière’s discussion here.

Lyotard, Heidegger, Jews, and “the jews”–#1

7/20/09

Today is the first of three posts on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews”, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1990; orig. French version 1988).  The use of the scare quotes and the lower case ‘j’ in “the jews” is intentional in the original French work and in its English translation.  By “the jews” Lyotard means the always already rejected, projected, and repressed “Other” of so called Western society.  According to Lyotard, it is only accidental, in a certain sense, that the Jews, meaning some actual, historical group of people, came to be identified with “the jews,” in the sense he has given to that phrase.

The entry below is one I first wrote in my philosophical  journal on the date indicated.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Years after I first read it, I am currently rereading Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews“.  Since first reading it, my focus has shifted to trauma, and I am reading it this time with an eye to that.  There are some thought-provoking passages, seen from that perspective of the focus on trauma.  One is on pp. 15-16, where Lyotard writes:

Nachträglichkeit [the "belatedness" that, according to Freud, characterizes trauma] thus implies the following:  (1) a double blow that is constitutively asymmetrical, and (2) a temporality that has noting to do with what the phenomenology of consciousness (even that of Saint Augustine) can thematize.

The double blow includes a first blow, the first excitation, which upsets the apparatus with such “force” that it is not registered. . . . The discovery of 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. . . .

The first blow, then, strikes the apparatus without observable internal effect, without affecting it. It is a shock without affect.  With the second blow there takes place an affect without a shock.  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 event:  that there is “comes before” what there is.

This “before” of the quod is also an “after” of the quid. 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. . . . This chronologization of a time that is not chronological, this retrieval of a time (the first blow) that is lost because it has not had time and place in the psychic apparatus, that has not been noticed there, fulfills exactly the presumed function of a protective shield that Freud attributes to it in Jenseits [Beyond the Pleasure Principle].

Then, on the next page (17), he uses this to argue that, with regard the idea, in Freud, of “the scene of a seduction perpetrated on the child, in ontogenesis, and in several versions of a phylogenetic event (including the last glaciations), the common motivation of these hypotheses (always fantastic) is nothing else than the unpreparedness [in principle, I would add] of the psychic apparatus for the ‘first shock’. . . . It is in this  fashion that the principle of an originary–I would say ontological–’seduction’ cannot be eluded (Laplanche), of a ‘duction’ toward the inside of something (of energy) that remains outside of  it.”

These passages, and even more the next one I will cite below, from  pages 26-27, add support to the suspicion I express in my “9/11 Never Happened” piece, about how the proliferation of images of 9/11, as earlier of Vietnam, served  only to cover over and avoid 9/11 and Vietnam.  Geared into that is my growing uneasiness in the face of all use of images of such things as the Holocaust,  9/11, or, in general trauma of whatever sort.

Here are the later passages  (pp. 26-27):  “But to make us forget the crime [of the Holocaust] by representing it is much more appropriate” than even the endeavor to “efface” it by “the criminals disguis[ing] themselves as courageous little shopkeepers [as did Eichman, for the prime example],” or to efface it by “‘denazi[ying]‘ them on the spot [as the Allies did, I suppose would be a good example, when they moved to make Germany a central piece in the chess game of the Cold War], or else one opens a lawsuit for a reappraisal of the crime itself (the ‘detail’), [and] one seeks dismissal of the case” (as he discusses on the preceding page, 25).  [Making us forget the crime by representing it is "more appropriate" than any of those ways of trying to "efface" it,]

if it is true that, with ‘the jews,’ it is a question of something like the unconscious affect of which the Occident does not want any knowledge. It 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.

I suggest just that same thing in “9/11 Never Happened,” where I argue that the worldwide proliferation via the mass media of video images of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the immediate aftermath, including people jumping to their deaths rather than die in the fires raging in the towers–those video images with which we were globally assaulted even while the attacks themselves were still unfolding in “real time”–may as well have been deliberately designed efforts to gloss over the event, the trauma, itself, to deaden and divert us from it,  to make us forget the unforgettable by remembering little or nothing but those graven and craven images:  an idolatry!

As I also said in a footnote somewhere in “9/11 Never Happened,” about the television coverage of the war in Vietnam:  Far from bringing the war “home” to us,  bringing it into our very “living rooms,” as has often been claimed it did, the televisioning of the Vietnamese war actually did the opposite, burying the war beneath all those images, pushing it back so far as to be beyond recall–or almost!

That is “the horror, the horror.”

“Shock and Awe”: The Globalization of Shock, The Globalization of Trauma (and the Globalization of the Possibility of Recovery?)

4/3/09

The entry below from my philosophical journal, originally written on the date indicated, concerns an essay from Traumatic Pasts:  History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930, ed. by Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner–a collection of essays by historians of various sorts.   

 

Monday, August 11, 2008

In the fourth [essay in Traumatic Pasts], “Event, Series, Trauma: The Probabilistic Revolution of the Mind in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Wolfgang Schäffner, who hold a Ph.D. in literary studies from the University of Munich, draws an interesting connection between trauma–especially as a matter of a series of “events” [which would in this context have to mean datable, objective occurrences], not ever reducible to just one such (but a matter of the experience of the event in a whole series of repetitions)–on the one hand, and the rise of the insurance industry, on the other.

page 89:

. . . insurance made the accident a social event and also created a new social field. . . . Just like crimes, accidents formed [items in a budget].  The problem of damage beyond relations of causative guilt, which could not be solved by liability laws, found its solution in the dispersion of single damages to all insured.  The local and individual occurrence of an accident changed into a risk threatening everybody and became a permanent event throughout society.  Risk invades the realm of the mind and can now be experienced without any external release.  It lurks, always and everywhere, evn in the  most minute and insignificant details.

He immediately draws the conclusion himself, in the very next line, with which he starts the first section of his paper, called “Pension Neurosis”:

Thus psychic trauma signifies probabilistic normalization, which was widely disseminated by accident insurance.  If one feels a permanent and regularly effected danger in a space beyond individual guilt, then risk exercises an invisble and constant power on the members of a society.  Through accident insurance this kind of power is articulated and intensified:  It acts as the implantation of risk.

In this sense, one can indeed argue that, as he puts it later on the same page, “insurance itself and not the accidents produced traumatic neurosis.”  As he also says, that also then, paradoxically, let the insurance companies try to cut their loses by arguing that it was not the accident as such that caused the trauma and that, therefore, there was no liability.  (He does not say so, but clearly such a paradoxical counter-move just intensifies the “implantation of risk” and, therefore, the prevalence of trauma as such!)

He sums up (p. 90): 

Therefore the problem of the trauma itself, the necessary uncertainty of its causation, and the particularity of experience are not demonstrations of social disorder; rather, they prove the power of techniques of normalization, which makes the risk of accident penetrate the mind. . . . Statistical probability is experienced by the “pension neurotic” as psychic trauma.  The accident experience is never completely actualized; it merges deferment and prognosis, traumatic past and future, and it erases the difference between occurrence and nonoccurrence. . . . With the independence of real psychic effects, simulation obtains a new status transcending classical distinctions of true and false.

He concludes his essay (p. 91):  “To view pension neurosis as an abuse of the social  insurance system is equivalent to failing to see the probabilistic revolution  of the  mind. . . . Ultimately, pension neurosis is a striking example of the tremendously successful control and normalization of human desires totally undreamed of by the experts themselves.”

Earlier in his piece, he cites [Walter] Benjamin; and the latter’s notion of modern life as one of  constantly recurring shock, inducing numbness, is certainly relevant to what Schäffner says.  So is Heidegger on Gestell [Heidegger's term for the "essence of modern technology," which reduces all things to supplies to be secured in reserve, so that what drives everything, in effect, is the ever self-escalating pursuit of security, or what I, with my background in the philosophy of addiction, would call "protecting the supply"]–especially [with regard to] the very closing of Schäffner’s essay, just quoted.

Following such lines of thought, one might argue that “trauma” is ineparable from “modernity” and its technologization of everything.  As shock becomes generalized and globalized, so does trauma.  However, what saves grows at the heart of this danger of all dangers, too [a reference to a line from a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin that Heidegger likes to cite:  "Where danger is,/there grows also what saves"].  In effect, the globalization of shock so effectively and, as it were, unintentionally, globalizes trauma along with the shock, that “recovery” starts to break out here, there, and–ultimately–everywhere, too.  As a distinctively “modern” pehnomenon, trauma–like Gestell–surfaces the eventful (event-ful) “structural” origin of experience itself.

Being Trauma: A Lesson from Heidegger’s Kant-Book

2/20/09

Late last spring into early last summer, while I  was also continuing to read Michel Henry’s L’essence de la manifestation, I reread, after a number of years, Heidegger’s “Kant-Buch” (“Kant-book”), as it is often referred to, in the original German–Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), first published in 1929, just two years after the appearance of Sein und Zeit (Being and  Time).  As my reading of Henry’s book generated a number of entries in my philosophical journal, only some of which were directly relevant to my continuing work with the idea of trauma (for one of which, see my preceding post), so did my rereading of Heidegger’s Kant-Buch engender various entries, of which the following, with the date I originally wrote it, is the only one that has more than a passing reference to trauma. 

Before proceeding to that entry, readers might appreciate a reminder that by the term Dasein, Heidegger tells us early in Being and Time, he means that being that each of us–each human being–is.  The literal meaning of the term, as Heidegger often reminds us in his own usage of it, is “Being-[the '-sein' of the German term]there [the 'Da-'].“

 

Saturday, July 5, 2008

It just struck  me for the first time with its full force that by “metaphysics of Dasein” Heidegger does not mean a metaphysics about Dasein, but, rather, the metaphysics–the “transcendence,” the passing beyond beings–that is Dasein.  He says that clearly toward the end of the Kant-Buch (p.231), the reading of which just this morning triggered that insight in me.

In effect,then, Heidegger’s use of the phrase “metaphysics of Dasein” points to what I would now think of as the traumatic essence (in the sense of Heidegger’s usage of ‘Wesen‘ [whereby it carries a strong verbal connotation, as of the bringing together into one of an-wesen, to be present, and ab-wesen, to be absent:  "essence" as the unitary-unifying "sence" of "ab-sence" and "pre-sence," so  to speak]) of Dasein:   Dasein, as Da-sein, is the wounding of/amidst beings by and with which the place is first cleared and set up for beings to be–the place of letting beings be.

Heidegger goes on in the same general passage (on pp.  232-233) to discuss how, as Entwurf [project, or projection:  literally, forth-cast], Seinsverständnis [understanding of Being:  for Heidegger, Dasein is characterized by always having some sort of understanding, however vague and undeveloped it may be, of what Being--what "to be"--means] is always and necessarily a matter of ripping (entreissen) what is projected (which is first and foremost, as Henry helps me to see, Being, not beings) from out of forgottenness.  What does that say, if not the traumatic essence/nature of Being itself!

And as traumatic in this way–as trauma itself:  “the” traumatic–Being is necessarily (as Entwerfen in Entwurf [pro-jecting, casting forth, in the pro-ject, the forth-cast, we might say]) finite.  Indeed, its finitude is precisely this, its traumatic structure = its structuring structure as the traumatic as such.

What’s more, Heidegger then goes on (p. 234) to note that “everydayness” is how forgetting of Being manifests itself.  That is,  “everydayness”is precisely the sort of numbing in the face of the traumatic that is inseparable from the traumatic as such–from what is precisely traumatizing in the traumatic.  Indeed, as just such numbing, everyday forgottenness of the traumatic is the “work” of the traumatic as such–it is the traumatizing it inflicts.

And precisely because the traumatic, in and as traumatizing, is the working and being-at-work and in-play of such forgetting and forgottenness–such forgetting of the forgotten–any coming to face the traumatic must be remembering, re-internalizing (Wiedererinnerung) of what has been thus forgotten (p. 233 [in my own translation from the German]: “The fundamental-ontological ground-cast of the metaphysics of Dasein as the laying of the ground of metaphysics is therefore a re-membering [Wiedererinnerung]“).

Our Relationships to the Dead: Some Remarks on Heidegger, Sartre, and Psychoanalysis

2/16/09

Today’s post contain entries, written earlier in my philosophical journal, occasioned by my reading of Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects:  Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2007).  

 

Friday, May 30, 2008

Davis, p. 34:  “By projecting the violence of society onto an identifiable group of criminals, the forces of order can assure the intelligibility of evil, deny their own responsibility for it, and indulge their inclination to violence in eradicating it.”

That fits to a tee the approach/lack of approach of Bush and his administration to 9/11.

 

Sunday, June 1, 2008

[He misunderstands both Heidegger and Sartre] on p. 52, on death and the dead, when Davis writes that in Heidegger death is, by Sartre’s critique [which Davis misstates, in my judgment], “too much the property of the individual,” [since] in Heidegger death would never in any sense be said to be any such “property.”  Later on the same page Davis goes on:  “Sartre differs from Heidegger in maintaining that a relation with the other persists beyond death.”  Davis bases that remark on a misunderstanding of Heidegger’s noting that the dead are no longer there “in the world” with the Dasein that remains alive and in the world.  Davis puts that, a few lines earlier, this way:  “For Heidegger, the dead are no longer part of our world.”  So far, okay–but only when properly understood, whereas Davis shows he does not understand it properly by going on:  “For Sartre, on the other hand, the dead are all around us . . .”  That sets up his already cited remark that the issue is whether one can still relate to the dead, once they’re dead.  Well, of course the dead are no longer “part of our world,” but for neither Sartre nor Heidegger does that entail we do not continue to be “in relation” to the dead.

 

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Davis (p. 77) on Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (of The Shell and the Kernel):  “In their study of the Wolf Man and their treatment of their own patients they came across what appeared to be signs of traumatized behavior which could not be traced back to any event in the life of the patient.  This lead to their most radical contribution to psychoanalytic theory:  the claim that the patient may be the bearer of someone else’s trauma.”

What if those “signs” are read differently, however, as pointing to the “structural” root of all trauma, whether it can be correlated to an “event,” in the relevant sense (i.e., some datable occurrence), or not?  What if trauma is thought as, say, the surfacing of the truth of the lie on which the entire edifice of Lacan’s Symbolic, and all that goes with it, including “sovereignty,” has to build itself?

 

P. 80, still concerning Abraham  and Torok:  “The dead do not return; what haunts us is the actively known injunction not to know what the dead bequeath us.   What we suffer from are the symptoms left behind by the secrets of others.”  P. 82:  “It is not the repressed which returns to wreck our lives, but the shame of others.”  What this forgets, however, us Heidegger’s lesson that I am myself, at least in my “everydayness,” one of those “others.”  And the model of repression here is still based on tracing repression to  some datable “event,” not to a structural fault.

 

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Davis, P. 89:  “To put it schematically, deconstruction is about learning to live with ghosts, psychoanalysis is about learning to live without them.”  Yet, as his own discussion goes on to indicate, that does not hold of Lacan; so at most it does for Abraham and Torok:  “The Lacanian analysand has to  learn that the ‘subject supposed to know’ in fact knows nothing, the Big Other’s most closely kept secret is that he does not exits.”

I do think, however, his critique of Derrida’s hauntology does have [some] weight.  P. 91:  “Derrida’s reluctance to cancel the debt [to the dead] and to lay the spectre can be traced back to a fear endemic in the post-postmodern world.  More terrifying than the return of ghosts may be the prospect that there is nothing to return, no survival, no resurrection, and no commanding voice from beyond the grave.”  Though the tenor is significantly different, this reminds me of my own refrain, in last fall’s trauma seminar [a seminar I taught at the University of Denver in fall quarter 2007 under the title "Philosophy and 9/11:  Sovereignty in Traumatic Times"], that “the trauma is that there is no trauma.”  His conclusion is good, on p. 92:  “Derrida is the philosophical  equivalent of the Big Brother contestant [on the TV program so named], willing to obey the ghosts’ commands even if he cannot yet quite discern what they might be.  And what returns, with the ghost, is the Big Other, the spectre of authority which we perhaps do not wish to learn to live without.”

A note, though:  the problem is not the idea of a debt to the dead that can never be paid.  Rather, it is the reduction of such indebetedness [to one] still calling to be paid, even if it can never be.  What needs to be abandoned is not the idea of an unpayable debt, but, rather, the idea that one should keep on trying to pay it anyway.

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?)