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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sovereignty of the Image #1: Obscene Images

Today I begin posting the draft of yet another chapter for what I hope will eventually become a book on trauma and philosophy–the first of two devoted to the same general topic.  I am calling this chapter “Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” with the one to follow to be called “Representation and Trauma II:  The Image of Sovereignty.”

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Men and women, sometimes even holding hands, jumping from the upper floors of the Twin Towers, preferring that way of dying to being burned alive by the fires raging behind them:  For many horrified spectators around the world watching on television during the events that took place in New York on September 11, 2001, there was something obscene about what seemed to be the compulsive broadcasting and rebroadcasting of those images.  Hundreds of millions worldwide saw them in the endless loop of replays that continued for a time after the Towers collapsed, before the mass media began to hold them back, in real or pretended sensitivity to how offensive they might be to large segments of their audience.

However, just wherein did the obscenity of the broadcasting and rebroadcasting of those images consist, for those who so perceived it?  Were the broadcasting and rebroadcasting obscene insofar as some sort of blatant exploitation of those horrible images for private gain might be suspected—for example, that some television network or other outlet might have been using them to build ratings?  Yet even many viewers who imputed no such motives to the broadcasters still experienced something obscene about what came across to them as the compulsive broadcasting of the images at issue.  What seemed obscene to such viewers was that those images were broadcast at all, regardless of the broadcasters’ motives.  To them, or at least some of them, there is something obscene about the very endeavor to represent trauma in images at all.

There is a sense in which any representation whatever of such public traumas as “9/11” or, to introduce another example (or reservoir for many examples), “Ausshwitz”–that is, the Holocaust–can be taken to entail a sort of exploitation of the suffering of others, regardless of conscious intention.  For such an understanding, the very representation of traumatic events, or at least of such public, historic ones as the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the Holocaust, is in a way a moral violation of the victims of such trauma—a perpetuation and repetition of their traumatization or wounding, a compounding of the harm and suffering already inflicted upon them.  By that way of perceiving things, the mere endeavor to represent trauma constitutes a sort of obscenity and blasphemy against those who have traumatized.   As Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in a passage I have already cited in the chapter on “Our Debt to the Dead,” in Heidegger and “the jews” (page 27):  “One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.”

As the title of his book suggests, Lyotard makes that remark in the context of discussing the Holocaust.  Lyotard sees something morally problematic about any effort to representing the Nazi “extermination” of the Jews in pictures or even in words.  “If one represents the extermination,” Lyotard writes, “it is also necessary to represent the exterminated.”  Accordingly, one ends up representing “men, women, children [being] treated like ‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘rats,’ ‘vermin,’ subjected to humiliation, constrained to abjection, driven to despair, thrown like filth into the ovens.”  However, in so representing those who were exterminated, “this representation forgets something,” something essential to remember.  “For it is not as men, women, and children that they are exterminated but as the name of what is evil—‘jews’—that the Occident has given to [its own] unconscious anxiety.”

Thus, under the very pretense of protecting the memory of the exterminated, representing them as men, women, and children—and how else is one supposed to represent them?—one inadvertently ends up perpetuating the very movement of extermination, of erasure of the truth about what was done to those exterminated.  Once again they are themselves thereby reduced to just another representation, as they had already been reduced by their executioners, their “exterminators,” to mere representatives of incarnate evil—“the jews,” as Lyotard puts it—to be exterminated in the first place.

Avoiding such unintentional exploitation of the victims of trauma is no easy matter, however.  Even critics who explicitly discern such exploitation in others’ representations, in works of cinema, books, or other forms, tend to fall prey to the same fault in their own accounts.  So, for example, in The New York Times for Sunday, January 9, 2009, in a piece called “Telling the Holocaust Like It Wasn’t,” Jacob Heilbrunn comments critically on a rash of recently released films all of which concerned the Holocaust in one way or another. Heilbrunn sets the tone for his whole critique by citing a scene from one of those films:  “Toward the end of the new film about postwar Germany  ’The Reader,’ a Holocaust survivor in New York curtly instructs a visiting German lawyer named Michael Berg that he would do well to remember that the camps were neither a form of therapy nor a university.  ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘came out of the camps.  Nothing.’”  Heilbrun insists that the films at issue, including The Reader, end up forgetting that point, by making the Holocaust serve some sort of “narrative of redemption.”

Later, however, at the beginning of his own two-paragraph closing, Heilbrunn effectively takes back what he has earlier given the reader in that opening passage.  “Perhaps,” he writes at the end of his article, “nothing came out of the Holocaust other than the determination to prevent a repetition of the crimes.”  Yet with such an ending Heilbrunn, despite himself one may assume, undercuts the very critique he has just given.  Having written that “the further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it’s being exploited to create a narrative of redemption,” he turns right around and offers nothing short of a redemption story of his own.  Thus, he too ends up exploiting what, by his own lights, is never to be exploited.

Our Debt to the Dead #5: Dishonoring the Dead

Below is the continuation of my draft for what I hope will eventually become a book chapter–a chapter on “our debt to the dead.”

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What do we owe the dead?  As I have noted before, in one way of taking that question—taking it, namely, to be a question concerning that for which we are indebted to the dead—the answer would be “everything.”  Furthermore, it is, as I have also noted before, in their very having died—that is, to put the same point a bit differently, precisely as dead—that the dead give us “everything.”

However, another way of taking the question of what we owe the dead–a way of taking it that is different, yet nevertheless inseparable, from the first–would be to take it as an inquiry about what would constitute proper response on the part of us, the living, to the dead, for what they have given us, the “everything” we owe them in the first sense.   Precisely given that what we owe the dead, in the first way of taking that notion, is “everything,” then just what would constitute a proper “response” to the dead, for what they have given us?  What response do the dead themselves, as dead, call upon us to make, given that we owe them everything?

What we owe the dead in that second sense of the question–that is, the response that would appropriately answer to the dead for what they have given us by and in their very dying–is to grant them in turn what I would like to call indemnity.  We owe the dead “indemnity” in the original etymological sense of that term whereby it means to keep from harm, to protect against loss.

How can the dead be harmed, however?  What more can they lose, given that they are already dead?  The most common answer would seem to be that they might lose their place in the memory of the living, and thereby suffer the harm of being forgotten.  Hence the common refrain of “Never forget!”  For example, Israelis admonish one another and the entire world to “never forget” what was done to the Jews of Europe in the Nazi extermination camps.  Or, to give a more recent example, bumper stickers and window decals carrying the same admonition never to forget those who lost their lives in the attacks of September 11, 2001, continue to show up on cars in the United States each fall.

Yet what we try in such ways never to forget will still eventually be forgotten, despite all our efforts at remembering.  Sooner or later, but inevitably, memory will fail.  The names of the dead, which we vowed never to forget, will be forgotten; and those who bore those names will sink into the great, anonymous mass of all the nameless dead of all the earlier ages.

Whatever can be remembered in the same sense that a name can be remembered, will inevitably be forgotten in time.  And even while the name is still remembered, there will come a time when the one who bore the name will no longer be, and only the name will remain. As Chrétien sees clearly, whatever can be remembered will be forgotten, and only what can never be remembered is truly unforgettable.

Before Chrétien, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote along the same lines, specifically with regard to the Jewish dead of the Holocaust.  In Heidegger and “the jews”, in a passage to which I will return in a later chapter on trauma and “representation,” Lyotard writes (page 27) that the Holocaust

cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words.  Representing ‘Auschwitz’ in images and words is a way of making us forget this.  I am not thinking here only of bad movies and widely distributed TV series, of bad novels or “eyewitness accounts.”  I am thinking of those very cases that, by their exactitude, their severity, are, or should be, best qualified not to let us forget.  But even they represent what, in order not to be forgotten as that which is forgotten itself, must remain unrepresentable.  Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah is an exception, maybe the only one. . . .

Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this might seem a good defense against forgetting it.  It is, I believe, just the opposite.  Only that which has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be effaced.  But what is not inscribed, through lack of inscribable surface, of duration and place for the inscription to be situated, . . . cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present “only” as an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of the spirit.  One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images.  One cannot escape the necessity of representing.  It would be sin itself to believe oneself safe and sound.  But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten, in writing.

It is to be feared that word representations (books, interviews) and thing representations (films, photographs) of the extermination of the Jews . . . by the Nazis bring back the very thing, . . . in the orbit of secondary repression. . . . It is to be feared that, through representation, it turns into an “ordinary” repression.  One will say, It was a great massacre, how horrible!  Of course, there have been others, “even” in contemporary Europe (the crimes of Stalin).  Finally, one will appeal to human rights, one cries out “never again” and that’s it!  It is taken care of.

A few lines later Lyotard contrasts all such endeavors “never to forget” the Holocaust–endeavors which, despite what may well be their authors’ own intentions, end up obfuscating and thereby perpetuating the very crime at issue—with what belongs “on the side of ‘the jews’” themselves.  He writes (pages 27-28):

One can represent the Nazi madness–make of it what it also is–an effect of “secondary” repression, a symptom; a way of transcribing anxiety, the terror in regard to the undetermined (which Germany knew well, especially then), into will, into political hatred, organized, administered, turned against the unconscious affect. . . . But on the side of “the jews,” absence of representability, absence of experience, absence of accumulation of experience (however multimillenial), interior innocence, smiling and hard, even arrogant, which neglects the world except with regard to its pain–these are the traits of a tradition where the forgotten remembers that it is forgotten; knows itself to be unforgettable, has no need of inscription, of looking after itself, a tradition where the soul’s only concern is with the terror without origin, where it tries desperately, humorously to originate itself by narrating itself.

The SS does not wage war against the Jews. . . . The war merely creates the din that is necessary to cover the silent crime. . . . –a second terror, a horror rather, practiced on the involuntary witness of the “first” terror, which is not even felt, not even lodged, but which is diffuse and remains in it like an interminably deferred debt.  In representing the second terror one ineluctably perpetuates it.  It is itself only representation. . . . One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.

Lyotard then sums up with a remark that can be generalized beyond efforts to remember the dead of the Holocaust, to apply to any efforts to remember any of the dead.  “All memory, in the traditional sense of representation,” he writes (my emphasis), “because it involves decision, includes and spreads the forgetting of the terror without origin that motivates it.”

We owe it to the dead, then, not to remember them, at least if remembering is taken “in the traditional sense,” wherein to remember the dead entails holding on to some “representation” of the dead, even if only their names.  Paradoxically, all such endeavors to honor the dead by always remembering them end up dis-honoring them.    It dishonors the dead by stripping them of the only thing left to them insofar as they are dead.  Instead of keeping the dead from harm, it harms them in the only way left to do so, once they are dead.  It harms the dead in that, far from protecting them against loss, it robs the dead of the one thing they still have:  their very death itself.   In an unusual but literal sense, it is a form of grave robbery.

Robbing the dead of their graves under the guise of remembering them is itself a way of attempting to gain control over death itself.  It is a matter of laying claim to what Robert Jay Lifton in Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003)—in which he drops, by the way and unfortunately to my mind, what I take to be his earlier fruitful suggestions, in Broken Connections, of a non-pathological concept of  ”survivor guilt” (which in this later work he calls “death guilt”)—calls “ownership of death.”   The dreams and assertions of a power so fantastic that it can lay claim to ownership even over death itself are built upon “profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness,” as Lifton writes (page 178), to cover those feelings over and avoid facing them.  What is behind such “a sense of megalomania and omnipotence” that extends even over death itself is, as Lifton observes a few lines later, “[f]ear of being out of control.”

Our fear of not being in control is always, at bottom, the fear of death, the point where we lose all control.  To avoid facing that fear, we are willing even to dishonor the dead, robbing them of their very death under the pretense of remembering them.

Before the alternative, that of facing the loss of all control, we can only swoon—as I will turn to next.

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, the Jews, and “the jews”–#2

7/22/09

This is the second of a series of three posts on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews”.  I first wrote the entry below in my philosophical journal on the date indicated.

Satruday, January 10, 2009

Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, p. 27, just after writing what I cited yesterday [see my preceding post], that ends with “Finally, one has appeal to human rights, one cries out ‘never again’ and that’s it!  It is taken care of,” he continues:  “Humanism takes care of this adjustment because it is of the order of secondary repression.  One cannot form an idea of the human being as value unless one projects one’s misery to the outside as caused by causes that one only needs to get down to transforming.”

This is also essentially what Paul Eisenstein says, when he argues that trauma is effectively denied its traumatization by the identification of trauma, which is finally always “structural,” with some one actual “historical” occurrence–or figure (such as “the Jew”) made to represent trauma–in precisely the negative sense of “represent” that Lyotard critiques in the passage I cited yesterday [see the preceding post].

He picks up that critique again a few lines later on p. 27:

If one represents the extermination, it is also necessary to represent the exterminated.  One represents men,  women, children treated like “dogs,” “pigs,” “rats,” “vermin,” subjected to humiliation, constrained to abjection, driven to despair, thrown like filth into the ovens.  But this is not enough, this representation forgets something.  For it is not as men, women, and children that they are exterminated but as the name of what is evil–”jews”–that the  Occident has given to the unconscious anxiety.  Compare [Robert] Antelme and [Elie] Wiesel, L’Espèce humaine [The Human Race] and Night. Two representations, certainly.  But Antelme resists, he is somebody who resists.

Then he makes a point similar to one Chrétien makes in The Ark of Speech (see my journal  entry above, for 12/28/08 [in my post before last]):

All resistance is ambiguous, as its name indicates.  Political resistance, but resistance in the Freudian sense.  It is a compromise formation that involves learning to negotiate with the Nazi terror, to manipulate it, even if only for a little; trying to understand it [cf. Claude Lanzman saying that it is obscene and blasphemous to try to give "meaning" or "explanation" to the Holocaust], so as to outsmart it; putting one’s life on the line for this; reaching the limits of the human species, for that.  It is war.  Deportation is a part of the war.  Antelme saves honor.

These remarks, especially in echoing relation with those of Chrétien, perhaps point to a way to resolve the issue of reconciling the liberation attested by the rebellion at Auschwitz with that equally–if not even more so–attested by the experience of the ultimately transitory, ephemeral, and illusionary character of the assertion of power in “Auswchwitz”–the problem that has surfaced more than once in my journals on trauma.  Maybe these echoing passages from Lyotard and Chrétien are the way-markers to  the way out of that apparent impasse.  That may well be a suggestion reinforced by how Lyotard goes on with his discussion.

Still on page 27 [and extending over to page 28], Lyotard goes on to say:

One can represent the Nazi madness–make of  it what it also is–an effect of “secondary” repression, a symptom; a way of transcribing anxiety, the terror in regard to the undetermined (which Germany knew well, especially then), into will, into political hatred, organized, administered, turned against the unconscious affect. . . . But on the side of “the jews,” absence of representability, absence of experience, absence of accumulation of experience (however multimillenial), interrior innocence, smiling and hard, even arrogant, which neglects the world except with regard to its pain–these are the traits of a tradition where the forgotten remembers that it is forgotten; knows itself to be unforgettable, has no need of inscription, of looking after itself, a tradition where the soul’s only concern is with the terror without origin, where it tries desperately, humorously to originate itself by narrating itself.

The SS does not wage war against the Jews. . . . The war merely creates the din that is necessary to cover the silent crime. . . . –a second terror, a horror rather, practiced on the involuntary witness of the “first” terror, which is not even felt, not even lodged, but which is diffuse and remains in it like an interminably deferred debt.  In representing the second terror one ineluctably perpetuates it [!!!].  It is itself only representation. . . . One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.  All memory, in the traditional sense of representation, because it involves decision, includes and spreads the  forgetting of the terror without origin that motivates it.

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.”