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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #4: Refusing Consolation, Concluded

In my preceding two posts I explored Jean Améry’s reflections on surviving Auschwitz.  Today, I move on to two of his later works, one on aging and another on suicide.  All three posts on his thought belong to the draft of what I am planning to be a book chapter on “Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma.”

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Améry is utterly uncompromising in his refusal of all strategies of avoidance, and in his commitment to recounting as honestly as he can the truth, as he has been given to see it.   It is a desolate, and desolating, truth.  To read his faithful testimony to that truth is difficult and challenging, leaving the reader stripped of all possibility of justifying his or her own desperate efforts of avoidance.

Nor is it only in the face of torture and of the death camps that Améry maintains his defiance.  It is also in the face of his own experience of aging, after surviving the camps, and even in the face of what he will eventually characterize, in his reflections on suicide, as the experience of radical “failure,” the sense of the ultimate, devastating defeat of one’s very life-endeavor.

In his preface to the first edition of his later work, On Aging:  Revolt and Resignation (translated by John D. Barlow [Bloomington and Indianapolis:  University of Indiana Press, 1994; French original, 1968]), Améry writes that what he calls the “experiments” that make up the essays of the book, but that he goes on to say–and as surely applies just as well to his earlier At the Mind’s Limits—are “in quality more like searches” than like experimental research, “went from being an analysis to being an act of rebellion, whose contradictory premise was the total acceptance of inescapable and scandalous things.”

The inescapable and scandalous things at issue in this later book are all the disturbing, degrading facts of the natural aging process, in the face of which Améry will no more permit himself any subterfuge or euphemistic evasion than he earlier permitted himself in the face of his experience of Auschwitz and the realities of torture.  He writes (pages 76-77) that “those who try to live the truth of their condition as aging persons,” as he insists on trying to do himself, must “accept annihilation.”  But such acceptance remains defiant, resistant, uncompromising, insofar as it is accompanied by a knowledge “that in this acceptance they can only preserve themselves if they rise up against it.”  In so rebelling against their own aging, however, those who try to live such truth never lose sight of the fact “that their revolt–and here the acceptance is an affirmation of something irrevocable–is condemned to failure.”

Assured of such failure from the very start, those who practice such accepting rebellion or rebelling acceptance “embark on an enterprise that cannot be accomplished.”  However, it is only by choosing to embark on that very enterprise that the aging can find the possibility of preserving their own integrity, “the only possibility they have of truly aging with dignity.”  All that is left to someone who makes such a choice is, as Améry writes in the final lines of the book (reminiscent of the final lines of Camus’s The Stranger), the hope to have “done something to disturb the balance, expose the compromise, destroy the genre painting, contaminate the consolation,” all consolation offered in the face of aging, decay, and death:  ”The days shrink and dry up.  He has the desire to tell the truth.”

Writing about suicide a few years later, Améry demonstrates the same adamantine fidelity to the truth that he has already shown in his works on aging and, first of all, on his experience in Auschwitz.  It is a fidelity above all to the truth of resistance–even and especially recalcitrant resistance toward that against which no resistance can ever hope to succeed, at least if success is measured by the standards of that very “reality” to which, in resiting it, one refuses to submit.

Thus, a few months before committing suicide himself, after being thwarted by the ministrations of others in an earlier attempt, Améry publishes On Suicide:  A Discourse on Voluntary Death (translated by John D. Barlow [Bloomington and  Indianapolis:  University of Indiana Press, 1999]) .  He discusses a case he has recently read about in the news, one in which a housemaid smitten by a popular singer of the day kills herself rather than face the reality of not being the singer’s lover.  Améry compares the housemaid’s case to the early twentieth century one of Otto Weininger.  Weininger, misogynistic author of the widely read Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), was born a Jew, but became ardently anti-Semitic, and killed himself in 1903 at the age of 23.  ”Weininger,” Améry writes (pages 25-26), “could not bear to be a Jew:  he was one.  My housemaid could not bear to be an anonymous woman upon whom  the singer’s attention was never bestowed:  she was one.”

By his analysis, both suicides attest to the same truth of hopeless resistance that he has earlier discussed in regard to Auschwitz and aging.  By suicide, Weininger and the housemaid smitten with the singer did not become what they were not (a non-Jew or the singer’s lover, respectively).  Nevertheless, in a certain sense, according to Améry (page 27), “at least in a foolish way in the moment before the leap,” each “was” (his emphasis) what he/she “could not be because reality would not allow it to [him/her]:  Weininger as a non-Jew, the girl with the broom as the sweetheart of the singer.”  Each rose up against reality–and became, in that foolish instant, what reality would not let each be–“by de-selfing their self themselves,” as he puts it a few pages later (page 29, his emphasis).

Such suicide revolts neither against life as such nor against death.  Rather, it revolts against the failure–Améry prefers and uses the French échec as more expressive, even just as a sound, of what he means–of one’s life.  Such failure is one of the two common conditions back of the decision to kill oneself, according to him, the other being “disgust with life,” such as one experiences in (page 47) Sartrian “naussée [nausea], one of the basic constituents of a human being,” wherein life, in the biological sense of the living as opposed to the “inorganic,” is experienced as “a malignant tumor,” as he puts it in parentheses a few pages earlier.

“What is suicide as natural death?” Améry asks (page 60).  He answers:  ”A resounding no to the crushing, shattering échec of existence.”  Such suicide is a refusal to live the life of “a failure.”

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #3: Refusing Consolation, Continued

I continue with my discussion of Jean Améry’s reflections on his experience as an inmate at Auschwitz.  My preceding post ended with his observation that anyone who has been subjected to torture, as he was, has lost all “trust in the world,” a loss that, he insists, can never be regained.  All that is left, says Améry, is fear.  ”Fear,” he writes, “and also what is called resentments.  They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”  I pick the discussion up at that point below.

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The irremediable collapse of what Améry calls trust in the world is the issue of trauma.  Especially when the trauma is experienced directly at the hands of others, as the tortured receive it from their torturers, what is lost is above all trust in others, replaced, in fact, by a now active distrust.  Nor need one have survived Auschwitz or torture in the narrow sense to experience such loss of trust.  As Susan Cheever, for example, writes with reference to her own experience with addiction, and its roots in trauma:  “The human balance that enables most people to live without mind-altering substances every day is fragile. It can be upset by trauma or by witnessing trauma.  Once you see what people can do to each other, it’s hard to go back to the level of trust in strangers and the human community that makes life bearable.”

Refusing even such recourse to addiction to mask what trauma reveals, Améry insists on facing the reality that trauma lays bare.  He remains true to his own traumatic experience, stripped down by it to what alone remains after trust in the world has been lost beyond recall—his fear, and his resentment.

Concerning the latter, Améry writes (page 70 of At the Mind’s Limits) that his resentments themselves “are there in order that the crime,” the crime that the Nazis have inflicted upon him and so many other victims of torture and the camps, never be allowed to fade, never be forgotten, and above all never be forgiven.  His resentments are there to make sure that, instead, the crime “become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”

Like one of Badiou’s “subjects,” Améry remains faithful to that truth, the truth of his trauma.  As Badiou argues, such fidelity is all that remains of “ethics” for one struck in the face by such a truth.  The only categorical obligation someone struck by such trauma has any longer, is to stick to the truth of that trauma itself, refusing all consolation.

It is just that obligation that makes it necessary, in and after Auschwitz, for Améry, the thoroughly secularized and assimilated Jewish of an equally secularized, assimilated Jewish family, to be a Jew.  Yet it is that very thing—being a Jew–that his secularization and assimilation have completely voided for him.  By leaving him without any religious and cultural background in, or experiential connection to, Judaism, his own concrete, historical Jewishness as so secularized and assimilated have made it impossible for him ever fully to be, at least in any traditionally understood way, what the crimes of the Nazis have unconditionally obligated him henceforth to be, namely, a Jew.

Accordingly, in a chapter aptly entitled “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Améry writes (page 94) that for a no longer possibly Jewish Jew like him, the impossible imperative placed upon him to be a Jew is also the imperative to live in a continual state of fear.

[S]ince being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is–beyond a duty–also fear.  Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I cannot even be sure if this is not my entire existence.  Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of my first blow from the policeman’s fist.  Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

“Without trust in the world,” he continues on the next page, “I face my surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone, and all that I can manage is to get along with my foreignness.”  Not only must he “accept being foreign as an essential element of [his] personality.”  Rather, he is even enjoined by the traumatic truth that has struck him (unbidden, one should note clearly) to “insist upon” that foreignness, that being permanently out of place, wherever he may happen to be, “as if upon an inalienable possession.”  Struck by trauma into fidelity to what so strikes him, he then sums up his predicament neatly:  “Still and each day anew I find myself alone.”

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #2: Refusing Consolation

I ended my preceding post–the first in a series that will contain what I hope will eventually become a book chapter tentatively entitled “Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma”–with the remark that what Holocaust survivor Jean Améry says about “believers” in the camps being able to transcend even Auschwitz suggests that such believers might seem to be examples of what Alain Badiou calls “subjects,” as opposed to what he calls “human animals.”  I pick up my reflections at that point in what follows.

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To this point it would seem to be Améry’s “believing person” who would constitute one of Badiou’s “subjects,” and not Améry himself or any other “nonreligious and politically independent intellectuals” like him, as he goes on to put it.  He insists that for such intellectuals Auschwitz deepened their disbelief not only in religious but also in secular notions that might have allowed them to make some sort of transcending sense out of all the horror and suffering.  Thus, Améry writes (page 18), referring to Heidegger:  “Occasionally, perhaps,” for such intellectuals as himself in Auschwitz, “that disquieting magus from Alemanic regions came to mind who said that beings  appear to us only in the light of Being, but that man forgot Being by fixing on beings.  Well now, Being.  But in the camp it was more convincingly apparent than on the outside that beings and the light of Being get you nowhere.”  On the next page he continues by referring back to an earlier citation from the poetry of Heidegger’s own beloved fellow Swabian, Hölderlin.  “Like the lyric stanza” from Hölderlin, Améry writes, such “philosophic declarations” as Heidegger’s “also lost their transcendency and then and there became in part objective observations, in part dull chatter.  Where they still meant something they appeared trivial, and where they were not trivial they no longer meant anything.”

“We did not become wiser in Auschwitz,” he observes a few lines later.  “And yet,” he adds (page 20),

the time in the camps was not entirely without value for us (and when I say us I mean the nonreligious and politically independent intellectuals).  For we brought with us the certainty that remains ever unshakeable, that for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus [a fool playing at fool's games] and that we were nothing more—or, better said, before we entered the camp were nothing more—than hominess ludentes.  With that we lost a good deal of arrogance, of metaphysical conceit, but also quite a bit of our native joy in the intellect and what we falsely imagined was the sense of life.

As he then sums up in the closing lines of the same page, the last lines of the first chapter of At the Mind’s Limits,  “the word [whether of the poet such as Hölderlin or of the “thinker” such as Heidegger, or even of the scriptures of religious believers] always dies where the claim of some reality is total.  It died for us a long time ago.  And we were not even left with the feeling that we must regret its departure.”

Picking up the same theme a few pages into his second chapter, “Torture,” after noting (page 26) that most of the time, “even in direct experience everyday,” what presents itself as reality is really “nothing but codified abstraction,” he writes that, in fact, “[o]nly in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with reality.”  One such (fortunately, no doubt) rare moment is the moment of torture itself.  However, he observes, the moment of contact with reality “does not have to be something as extreme as torture.”  Rather, “[a]rrest is enough and, if need be, the first blow one receives.”

Thus, it is a matter of trauma, where the datable occurrence is the occasion and/or emblem of the “reality” that reveals itself through it.  It is not the datable occurrence itself that is traumatic, but the revelation of reality that takes place in that occurrence.  That reality can break in upon a person with the “first blow” he has just mentioned, and with which he continues his reflections (page p. 27):  “The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come.”  Thus, already at that first blow (p. 28), “trust in the world breaks down.”

Life void of all such trust—that is what trauma gives us to understand, at least by Améry’s analysis.  Thus, the issue is to find out what it is, to “understand” that—to live continuously in the “knowledge that there is nowhere to go, no help to come, no room for such trust any longer.”

As he notes a few pages later (page 35), under torture “[a] slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other—along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine [Beethoven] symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation—into a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.”  Nor is there any possibility of return from that revelation the tortured are given of the face of reality.  Thus, concerning his own torture, Améry writes:  “It is still not over.  Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself [in hopes of that stopping the torture—since he has no real information to divulge].  In such an instance, there is no ‘repression.’”

“Whoever has succumbed to torture,” he continues a few pages later (page 40), “can no longer feel at home in the world.  The shame of destruction cannot be erased.  Trust in the world . . . will not be regained. . . . It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.  Fear—and also what is called resentments.  They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #1: “The Secret of Joy”

Today’s post is the first in a series designed as the draft of another chapter to what I hope eventually to work up into a book on trauma and philosophy.  My immediately preceding series of posts presented the draft of one such chapter, tentatively titled “The Truth of Trauma.”  This series belongs to a chapter I have given the working title of “Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma.”

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In her 1992 novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker tells the story of an African woman traumatized by female genital mutilation.  Tashi eventually returns from the United States, where she has been undergoing recovery in therapy for the trauma that has come to define her, to Africa, where she kills the primary perpetrator of her traumatic mutilation.  The novel ends with the soul of Tashi recounting how, handcuffed and on the way, back in Africa, to her execution for that homicide, Tashi finds clarity about “the secret of Joy” on a poster some of her supporters unfurl for her to see as she moves on to her death.  The poster proclaims that resistance is the secret of joy.

That conclusion drawn from Tashi’s fictional story in Walker’s novel is reminiscent of the conclusion Robert Antelme draws in his non-fiction memoir of internment in the Nazi camps (see the relevant entries in my preceding series of posts on “The Truth of Trauma”).  Tashi’s very death from execution continues to be an exercise of resistance—and therefore something joyful, given the message Walker assigns Tashi’s story to carry, as articulated on the very last page of the novel.  Though the joyful element may not sound as clearly in Antelme’s reflections, the pivotal point that death itself, and the dead, can be a continuation of the very resistance that, according to Antelme, assures us that there is only one “human race,” including even the Nazis, and thereby dispelling the phantom of the Nazi’s own exclusionary dream

Echoed later by Walker’s story of Africa, America, and Tashi’s trauma of female genital mutilation, Antelme’s experience that death itself, and the corpse it leaves behind, can constitute a resistance to everything the Nazi camp system stood for, also finds an important counterpoint in the reflections of another author who also survived the Nazi camps —“survived” them at least after a fashion, as I will soon explain.

Although Antelme did indeed undergo incarceration in the Nazi concentration camps, ending up at Dachau, the very first camp the Nazis opened, from which he was eventually rescued, he was never sent to one of the Nazi extermination camps as such, the “death camps” properly speaking.  In contrast, Jean Améry–originally named Hans Mayer when born into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna, but who rejected that German name in favor of a French one, with the French surname being an anagram of his original German one—survived even Auschwitz, the paradigm of the death camps.

In At the Mind’s Limits:  Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld [Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1980]), in his preface to the reissue of 1977 (pages x-xi), after remarking that his reflections in the book “stand in the service of an enlightenment,” Améry warns the reader that what he is calling enlightenment “is not the same as clarification.” He then explains:

Clarification would also amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history.  My book is meant to aid in preventing precisely this.  For nothing is resolved, no conflict is settled, no remembering has become a mere memory.  What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.  I rebel:  against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way.  Nothing has healed . . .

Later, in the body of his memoir he writes (on page 14):

What I felt [sic] to comprehend at that time [in Auschwitz] still appears to me a certainty:  Whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself.  He is not the captive of his individuality; rather is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. . . . For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits. . . . For the believer reality is clay that he molds, a problem that he solves.

This stands as a sort of confirmation in advance of what contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou says about the “eternity” of the “subject,” as Badiou uses that term.  For Badiou, the “subject,” properly speaking, is always defined by a truth event and his “confidence” in it.  As truth, even that truth that can only occur as an event, is eternal, so is the “subject” defined by her standing in that truth.  Badiou thus opposes the eternity of the “subject” to the mortality of the mere “human animal,” the “individual” as an indifferent unit of multiplicity.

* * * * *

To be continued in my next post.

Killing to Heal: Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi Doctors, #1

6/5/09

Last fall, while reading Jean-Luc Nancy’s three works on the “deconstruction of Christianity”–Corpus, Noli me tangere, and Dis-Enclosure, which have been the topics of my three immediately preceding posts–I was also reading psychaitrist Robert J. Lifton’s important study The Nazi Doctors:  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York:  Basic Books, 1986; with new introduction by the author, 2000).  Today is the first of a series–one of my most lengthy series–of posts on Lifton.  The entries below from my philosophical journal were first written on the dates indicated.

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 3 (opening of the book’s introduction):

I gained an important perspective on Auschwitz from an Israeli dentist who had spent three years in that camp.  We were completing a long interview. . . . He looked about the comfortable  room in his house with its beautiful view of  Haifa, sighed deeply, and said, “This world is not this world” [which Lifton takes as the title of this introductory chapter].  What I think he meant was that, after Auschwitz, the ordinary rythms and appearances of life, however innocuous or  pleasant, were far from the truth of human existence.  Underneath those rythms and appearances lay darkness and menace. . . . [We resist this truth:] For to permit one’s imagination to enter into the Nazi killing machine–to begin to experience that killing machine–is to alter one’s relationship to the entire human project.  One does not want to learn about such things.

That again raises the crucial question I tried to raise in this journal a month or so ago, in conjunction with reading Jean Améry.  That is this question:

What is the truth of Auschwitz?

Not:  “What is the truth about Auschwitz.”  Rather:  What “truth of human existence,” as Lifton calls it, flashes forth at and as “Auschwitz”?

As I also noted when writing about Améry:  Is the truth that Améry sees the same as this Jewish survivor dentist in Haifa [as Lifton reads his words]–”darkness and menace”?  Or is it the truth of resistance, as Améry himself also suggests at places.

Alternatively worded, from Lifton:  Precisely what “alteration” in “one’s relationship to the entire human project” does encounter with Auschwitz call forth and call for?

 

Lifton is close to [Zygmunt] Bauman, whose book [Modernity and the Holocaust, which has been the subject of some of my earlier posts] appeared three years later [than Lifton's on the Nazi doctors].  For one thing, Bauman would agree with this, from p. 14 in Lifton:

In Nazi mass murder, we can say that a barrier was removed, a boundary crossed:  that boundary between violent imagery and periodic killing of victims (as of Jews in pogroms) on the one hand, and systematic genocide in Auschwitz and elsewhere on the other.  My argument in this study is that the medicalization of killing–the  imagery of killing in the name of healing–was crucial to that terrible step.  At the heart of the Nazi enterprise, then, is the destruction of the boundary between healing and killing.

 

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Lifton, on the early stages of the Nazi “euthanasia” program, when children were subjected to “medical killing,” as Lifton correctly names it, p. 55:

Th[e] structure served to diffuse individual responsibility.  In the entire sequence–from the reporting of cases by midwives or doctors, to the supervision of such reporting by institutional heads, to expert opinions rendered by central consultants, to coordination of the  market forms by Health Ministry officials, to the appearance of the child at the Reich Committee institution for killing–there was at no point a sense of personal responsibility for, or even involvement in, the murder of another human being.  Each participant could feel like no more than a small cog in a vast, officially santioned, medical machine.

As I’ve long maintained, here lies the whole key and secret to contemporary organization/statehood/sovereignty/government/ administration.  The telephone company again!  Why, as I wrote [the chair of my department] a few days ago, the worst conceivable form of government/administration is one by committee.

In contrast, there is AA, [for example,] in which [the principle of] responsibility for the “whole” is brought home to each and every individual member at every step, everywhere.

Jean Améry: Discordant Echoes to Levi–#4

5/4/09

Today’s post contains the final entry, originally written last fall on the date indicated below, in the series of entries from my philosophical journal reflecting on the works of Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry.  Not long after publishing the book on suicide I address in the following entry, Améry succeeded in committing suicide himself. 

In his writing on suicide, as earlier in his writing on aging, and first of all in his writing on Auschwitz and all that name stands for, Améry demonstrates an adamantine fidelity to the truth as he has been given to experience it and, above all, to the truth of resistance, even and especially against that against which no resistance can ever hope to succeed, at least if success is measured by the standards of that very “reality” to which, in resiting it, one refuses to submit.

 

Monday, September 22, 2008

Jean Améry, On Suicide:  A Discourse on Voluntary Death, trans. John D. Barlow (Bloomington and  Indianapolis:  University of Indiana Press, 1999).

Pp. 25-26:

[Otto] Weininger [the Jewish but anti-Semitic, misogynistic author of Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), who killed himself in 1903 at 23] could not bear to be a Jew:  he was one.  My housemaid [i.e., one Améry read about in the paper, who killed herself because she could not  become the beloved or a popular singer she'd become fixated upon] could not bear to be an anonymous woman upon whom  the singer’s attention was never bestowed:  she was one.

By suicide, they did not become what they were not (a non-Jew or the singer’s lover, respectively).  Nevertheless, in a certain sense, (p. 27) “at least in a foolish way in the moment before the leap,” each “was” (his emphasis) what he/she “could not be because reality would not allow it to [him/her]:  Weininger as a non-Jew, the girl with the  broom as the sweetheart of the singer.”  Each rose up against reality and became, in that foolish instant, what reality would not let each be, in effect, to use a line from a couple of pages later (p. 29), “by de-selfing their self themselves”  (his emphasis).

Compare the “resistance”and “revolt” of “striking back” at Auschwitz, and of remaining faithful to the  truth of aging:  In all three cases–Auschwitz, aging, dying –in the act (or event) of such  resistance there is the only possible victory here, that of the revelation of the truth–a truth against Auschwitz, age, and death, one showing that those tree are the illusion:  “I passed by again, they were not  there.”

 

Or it is no doubt better to say the suicide revolts not against death as such, but against the failure (he prefers and uses the French échecas more expressive–even as sound–of what he means) of  one’s life.  Such failure is one of the two common conditions back of the decision to kill oneself [according to him], the other being “disgust with life,” [such as] one experiences life in (p. 47) “[l']naussée, one of the basic constituents of a human being,” and wherein life [in the biological sense:  the living as opposed to the "inorganic"] is experienced as I [myself] perceived it could be on my way to Mazatlan by train years ago, namely (as he puts it in parentheses a few lines before the remark on “nausea”), “a malignant tumor.” 

Thus, p. 60:  “What is suicide as natural death?  A resounding no to the crushing, shattering échec of existence.”  A refusal to live the life of “a failure.”

Jean Améry: Discordant Echoes to Levi–#3

May 1, 2009

The entry below, first entered in my philosophical journal last September, continues my reflections on the work of Jean Améry.  Having addressed At the Mind’s Limits, his account of his experience in surviving Auschwitz, in the entries from my last two posts, in the entry I am posting today I turn to his account of his experience of his own aging process years after his release from the camps.  In both cases–facing the reality of Auschwitz and facing the reality of his own aging, and the losses it brings–Améry is utterly uncompromising in his refusal of all strategies of avoidance, and in his commitment to recounting as honestly as he can the truth, as he has been given to see it.   It is a desolate, and desolating, truth.  To read his faithful testimony to it is difficult and challenging, leaving the reader stripped of all possibility of justifying his or her own desperate efforts of avoidance.

 

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Améry, On Aging:  Revolt and Resignation, trans. John D. Barlow (Bloomington and Indianapolis:  University of Indiana Press, 1994; Fr. orig. 1968), “Preface to the First Edition,” p. xxii:  “. . . my experiments [which make up the essays of the book, and as also applies to Limits], in quality more like searches, went from being an analysis to being an act of rebellion, whose contradictory premise was the total acceptance of inescapable and scandalous things.” 

 

PP. 76-77: 

. . .those who try to live the truth of their condition as aging persons . . . accept an-nihilation, knowing that in this acceptance they can only preserve themselves if they rise up against it, but that their revolt–and here the acceptance is an affirmation of something irrevocable–is condemned to failure. . . . They embark on an enterprise that cannot be accomplished.  That is their choice and is, perhaps, the only possibility they have of truly aging with dignity.

Thus, as it was for the inmate at Auschwitz, so it is with the aged before [that is, in the face of] aging.  Cf. Améry on that idea in relation to Auschwitz.  Cf., too, Laub on the insurrection at Auschwitz.  [Both discussed in earlier posts.]

 

Last lines of the book:  “Has A. [here, obviously referring to himself] done something to disturb the balance, expose the compromise, destroy the genre painting, contaminate the consolation [in the face of death]?  He hopes so.  The days shrink and dry up.  He has the desire to tell the truth.”

Struck by that truth, remaining faithful to it, does he not thereby become a Badiouian “subject”?

Jean Améry: Discordant Echoes to Levi–#2

4/29/09

I continue with entries from my philosophical journal addressing the work of Auschwitz survivor–and later suicide–Jean Améry.  In the entry below, under the date I originally wrote it, I begin with some reflections occasioned by my ongoing reading, last spring and summer, parallel to my reading of Améry and others concerning trauma, of 20^th century French phenomenologist’s Michel Henry’s massive L’essence de la manifestation. 

 

Friday, September 19, 2008

Henry, L’essence:  Insofar as suffering and joy are [according to Henry] tied together in an identity as the very life of the absolute, then (pp. 845-846):  ”In Christianity it is no longer a question of combating suffering, whether it be in trying to eliminate its exterior causes, as in the Western world of technology, or in abolishing all interior resistance against it, as in Buddhism, or yet in  progressively blunting sensibility in the manner of winning through to a heroic sensibility, as in stoicism.”

In reading such remarks this morning I can’t help thinking back to reading Améry yesterday on the vacuity of philosophy (in a diatribe directed especially to Heidegger as example) in the face of the reality laid bare at Auschwitz.  Certainly it would be nothing but a sadistic joke to burden Auschwitz victims further by telling them their “suffering” is really joy.  [Nor, certainly, would Henry, who was himself active in the French  Resistance, ever do such a thing.]

In fact, the issue of “Auschwitz”/trauma as  such might well be joined as that between what Henry espouses–the identity of suffering and joy–and what Améry represents–the irreducibility of the suffering of the torture victim/Auschwitz inmate/other equivalent–how to “adjudicate” this issue is the issue.

Alternatively, the issue is to “adjudicate” between what, for example, [Dori] Laub reveals as the truth of the uprising at Auschwitz, which, as I read that in the relevant entry above [and posted earlier, in my series of posts on the work of Laub and Shoshana Felman], can be taken as the Biblical recognition, in the Psalms, of the ultimate transitoriness of the powerful and wealthy (“I passed by again, they were not there”), on the one hand, and Améry/the reality of Auschwitz as such, on the other:  Which is the real reality, in effect?

How “adjudicate” that?  Especially when it is clear to me that in one sense it cannot be adjudicated:  One cannot find in favor of one side over the other.  Both “testimonies” carry equal weight here–an absolute weight.  They are not theses or claims being advanced such that only one of the two can be true.  Rather, both are true, yet it also seems that they contradict each other.

The task, perhaps, is to explore the exact nature of  their “contradiction.”

 

Soon after his remak above, Henry (pp. 851 ff.) discusses Kierkegaard, in particular the latter’s definition of despair as always despair of/over one’s self, and most especially in the form of despair over being unable to escape one’s self, as requiring the relinquishment of one’s definitive passivity of being, passivity as the very essence of selfhood, of givenness to oneself.  There may be something there to explore with regard to torture/Auschwitz.  Certainly the tortured would like to get rid of the passivity manifest in torture and [the] suffering [it brings], and “despair” of ever being able to escape that passivity.  [Yet it would be blasphemous in any fashion to "accuse" torture victims or Auschwitz inmates of "despair" conceived as some sort of moral failing or "sin."]

 

I need to continue to think about all this.

 

Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 89:  “It is certainly true that dignity can be bestowed only by society. . . . Still, the degraded person, threatened by death, is able to convince society of his dignity by taking his fate upon himself and at the same time rising in revolt against it”–i.e., as he goes on to make clear, by striking back (p. 90):  “I finally relearned what I and my kind often had forgotten and what was more crucial than the moral power to resist:  to hit back.”  P. 91:  “I became a person not by subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering myself within the given  social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realizing myself as one.”

Compares directly to Laub and, in the last remark, even to Badiou.

Also, however, raises again “the issue,” only now in terms of resisting/not resisting evil.

 

Améry, Limits, last chapter, “On the Necessity and Impossibility [especially for a Jew like him, with no religious or cultural background in Judaism] of Being a Jew,” p. 94: 

But since being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is–beyond a duty–also fear.  Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I cannot even be sure if this is not my entire existence.  Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of my first blow from the policeman’s fist.  Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

 P. 95:  “Without trust in the world I face my surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone,  and all that I can manage is to get along with my foreignness.  I must accept being foreign as an essential element of my personality, insist upon it as if  upon an inalienable possession.  Still and each day anew I find myself alone.”

 

 P. 99:  “I . . . am not ‘traumatized,’ but rather my spiritual and psychic condition corresponds completely to reality.”

 His point is unassailable (it would be arrogance and presumption to call it into question), but how he puts it reveals a certain understanding of trauma that I do question–or perhaps it would be better to say that I would relativize.

 (He continues interestingly:  “The consciousness of my being a Holocaust Jew is not an ideology.  It may be compared to  the class consciousness that Marx tried to reveal to the proletarians of the nineteenth century.”  If so, then “Marxism” is also not an ideology, and it is also unassailable.)

 P. 100 (next to last page [of the book]):  ” ‘Hear, oh Israel’ is not my concern.  Only a ‘hear, oh world’ wants angrily to break out from within me.  The six-digit number on my forearm demands it.  This is what the awareness of catastrophe, the dominant force of my existence, requires of me.”

Jean Améry: Discordant Echoes to Levi–#1

4/27/09

 

As last summer came to an end, my reading went on from Primo Levi’s writings, as addressed in my preceding four posts, to those of another Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry.  The entry below is from my philosophical journal at that time, and is the first in a series I will post addressing Améry’s work.

 

 

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

 

Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits:  Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1980), Preface to the Reissue, 1977, pp. x-xi.  [After remarking that "the present reflections . . . stand in the service of an enlightenment," but that "enlightenment is not the same as clarification," he writes:] 

Clarification would also amount to disposal [cf. Lanzman], settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history.  My book is meant to aid in preventing precisely this.  For nothing is resolved, no conflict is settled, no remembering has become a mere memory.  What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.  I rebel:  against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way.  Nothing has healed . . .

 

Thursday, September 18, 2008

 

Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 14: 

What I felt [sic.] to comprehend at that time [in Auschwitz] still appears to me a certainty:  whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself.  He is not the captive of his individuality; rather is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. . . . For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits. . . . For the believer reality is clay that he molds, a problem that he solves.

 

This stands as a sort of confirmation of Badiou on the “eternity” of the subject, who is always defined by a truth event and his “confidence” in it, as opposed to the mortality of the mere “human animal,” the “individual” as opposed to the “subject.”

 

 

 

P. 18:  “Occasionally, perhaps [for the “intellectual” in Auschwitz, such as Améry himself] that disquieting magus from Alemanic regions [Heidegger, of course] came to mind who said that beings appear to us only in the light of Being, but that man forgot Being by fixing on beings.  Well now, Being.  But in the camp it was more convincingly apparent than on the outside that beings and the light of Being get you nowhere.”  (Granted—and it must be faced, as I’ll return to—but might not the fixation on beings in the oblivion of the forgottenness of Being have been what made Auschwitz itself possible, in the first place?)  P. 19:  “Like the lyric stanza [from Hölderlin he’s earlier written about] . . . , the philosophic declarations also lost their transcendency and then and there became in part objective observations, in part dull chatter.  Where they still meant something they appeared trivial, and where they were not trivial they no longer meant anything.”  Later on the same page:  “We did not become wiser in Auschwitz. . .”  However, as he adds on p. 20: 

And yet, the time in the camps was not entirely without value for us (and when I way us I mean the nonreligious and politically independent intellectuals).  For we brought with us the certainty that remains ever unshakeable, that for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus and that we were nothing more—or, better said, before we entered the camp were nothing more—than hominess ludentes.  With that we lost a good deal of arrogance, of metaphysical conceit, but also quite a bit of our native joy in the intellect and what we falsely imagined was the sense of life.

Later, same page, last lines of his first chapter (“At the Mind’s Limits”):  “the word always dies where the claim of some reality is total. It died for us a long time ago.  And we were not even left with the feeling that we must regret its departure.”

 

Then, in his next chapter, “Torture,” he writes (p. 26):  ”. . . even in direct experience everyday, reality is nothing but codified abstraction [which sound very like Heidegger, actually].  Only in rare moments of life [such as the torture he is about to describe and address] do we truly stand face to face with reality.  It does not have to be something as extreme as torture.  Arrest is enough and, if  need be, the first blow one receives.”  (So it is a matter of trauma, where the datable occurrence is the occasion and/or emblem of the “reality” that reveals itself through it.  It is not the datable occurrence itself that is traumatic, but the revelation of reality that takes place in that occurrence.)  Continuing the discussion (p. 27):  “The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come.”  And thus, already at that first blow (p. 28), “trust in the world breaks down.”

 

Life void of all such trust—that is what trauma gives us to understand.  Thus, the issue is to find out what it is, to “understand” that—to live continuously in the “knowledge that there is nowhere to go, no help to come, no room for such trust any longer.”

 

 

 

P.35, still on torture:  “A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other—along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine [Beethoven] symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation—into a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.”

 

As he has already written, there is no return from the revelation the tortured are given of the face of reality.  P. 36, on his own torture:  “It is still not over.  Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself [in hopes of that stopping the torture—since he has no real information to divulge].  In such an instance, there is no ‘repression.’”

 

P. 40 (end of chapter):  “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.  The shame of destruction cannot be erased.  Trust in the world . . . will not be regained. . . . It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.  Fear—and also what is called resentments.  They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”

 

 

 

P. 70:  “. . . my resentments are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”