Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #9: Resistance and the Refusal of Meaning, Concluded

In my last post, I began a discussion of philosopher and rape survivor Susan J. Brison’s book Aftermath.  What I am posting below completes that discussion, as it completes my draft of the chapter on “Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma.”  Below, I begin by reproducing the passage from Brison’s book that I cited at the very end of my preceding post, to give context to what follows.

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. . . 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?’  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.

Only considerably later, near the end of the book, do we learn that the reference to suicide in the passage just quoted is not only thematically important for Brison’s discussion of recovery from trauma.  It is also biographically important for Brison herself, as she reveals by telling the reader that it was her own brother’s death by suicide one day before Christmas in 1995 that (page 115) “made [her] rethink the importance of regaining control in recovering from trauma.”

Up to that point, her experience of her rape and its aftermath had led her to think of recovery from trauma as entailing regaining a sense of control, especially by constructing a narrative in which the trauma becomes integrated into the ongoing life-story of the trauma survivor, in a process involving seeking out and being heard by empathic listeners.  In succeeding in constructing and sharing such a narrative, the trauma survivor is able to “make sense” of the traumatic experience.  However, her brother’s suicide five years after she was raped—and it is well worth noting explicitly here that by experiencing her brother’s suicide Brison herself survives yet another trauma, on top of the one she suffered five years earlier when she was raped and beaten—occasions her rethinking of the whole matter yet again.

“Maybe,” she writes (still on page 115) concerning the results of her rethinking,  “the point is to learn how to relinquish control” (emphasis added) rather than somehow to regain it.  She then uses the Freudian distinction between “acting out” an earlier trauma in one’s ongoing behavior, as if one were trying at last to “get it right,” in effect, and “working through” the trauma.   Learning to relinquish control, she comes to think after her brother’s suicide, requires that we “learn by going where we need to go, to replace the clenched, repetitive acting out with the generativity of working through.”  Compulsive repetition, “although [itself] uncontrollable,” as she notes, “is, paradoxically, obsessed with control, with the soothing, numbing safety of the familiar,” and can go so far as to “instill the dangerous, even deadly, illusion of invincibility.”  In contrast, the process of working through “is inventive, open to surprise, driven to improvisation,” and “ can provide the foundation of trust on which new life can be built, the steady bass continuo that liberates the other parts to improvise without fear.”

With these remarks toward the end of her book, Brison picks up and deepens a useful distinction she has earlier introduced between what she calls “living to tell,” on the one hand, and “telling to live,” on the other.  Those who survive trauma, as Brison herself survived being raped and beaten, often report that it was the felt need to survive the ordeal in order that they could subsequently bear witness to what they had gone through.  For them, they had to live through the ordeal in order to tell about it later, eventually constructing a coherent trauma narrative and finding empathic listeners to hear that narrative, as has already been discussed.

However, Brison eventually discerns—no doubt as the result, given what she reveals to the reader only later, of the rethinking her brother’s suicide occasioned for her–that there are definite limits to the healing potential of this process of living to tell, and that in order to continue to recover beyond those limits one must switch to the very different process of telling to live.  Thus, she writes (pages 103-104):

What I emphasized earlier in the book as the central task of the survivor–regaining a sense of control, coming up with a coherent trauma narrative and integrating it into one’s life story–may be crucial to the task of bearing witness, of living to tell, but it may, if taken too far, hinder recovery, by tethering the survivor to one rigid version of the past.  It may be at odds with telling to live, which I now see as a kind of letting go, playing with the past in order not to be held back as one springs away from it.  After gaining enough control over the story to be able to tell it, perhaps one has to give it up, in order to retell it, without having to ‘get it right,’ without fear of betraying it, to be able to rewrite the past in different ways, leading up to an infinite variety of unforeseeable futures.

My earlier discussions of the primary effects of trauma emphasized the loss of control and the disintegration of the (formerly coherent [as she supposed] self.  My current view of trauma is that it introduces a ‘surd’–a nonsensical entry–into the series of events in one’s life, making it impossible to carry on with the series. . . .

I thought I had made a certain sense of things until the moment I was assaulted.  At any rate I thought I knew how to carry on with my life–to project myself, through action, into an imagined future–the way one knows how to go on in a series such as 2, 4, 6, . . . Not that there was a unique pattern leading ineluctably into a predictable future.  The series could have been continued in any number of different ways. . . . But the assumption was that I could find some way of carrying on the narrative of my life.  Trauma shatters this assumption by introducing an event that fits no discernible pattern.  The result is an uneasy paralysis.  I can’t go on, I can’t stay.  All that is left is the present, but one that has no meaning. . . .

Narrative, as I now think, facilitates the ability to go on opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past.  It does this not by reestablishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions.

Trauma breaks the illusion of control.  Even more fundamentally, it breaks the illusion of meaningful coherence on which that of control itself depends—the illusion that there is any meaning that can be made to encompass and “make sense” of everything.  Trauma is what stands as an exception to the rule that everything has to make sense.  It is the ab-surd of non-sense, we might say, building on Brison’s remark that trauma “introduces a ‘surd’—a non-sensical entry—into the series of events in one’s life, making it impossible to carry on with the series.”  Trauma is the non-sense that breaks the frame of reference of sense itself.

Concerning the relationship between endeavor of living to tell and that of telling to live, Brison suggests that it is only at the point of the ultimate collapse of the former that the latter can arise.  The point of the breakdown of the endeavor of living to tell would thus also be the point of breakthrough for the opposed endeavor of telling to live.  Indeed, Brison comes to see the final purpose or function of living to tell, as part of recovery from trauma, to be getting trauma survivors to that point of breakdown and, therefore, possible breakthrough.  In effect, the whole point of living to tell would be to get to the point where living to tell no longer has any point, which is just the point where telling to live comes to have one.  “It may be,” Brison writes  (pages 109-110), “that the retroactive attempt to master the trauma through involuntary repetition is carried out, intrapsychically, until a listener emerges who is stable and reliable enough to bear witness to it.  Perhaps there is a psychological imperative, analogous to the legal imperative, to keep telling one’s story until it is heard.  After the story has been heard and acknowledged, one can let it go, or unfreeze it.  One can unclench.”

What one can at last let go of, is not just the endeavor to make sense of what are supposed to be isolable cases of trauma, as if traumas were just isolated islands of meaninglessness within a vast, surrounding ocean of meaningful events.  Rather, what makes trauma so traumatic in the fist place is that it reveals the nonsense of thinking that everything somehow ultimately makes sense, that there is some sort of ultimate meaning to everything that happens, some sufficient reason for its happening.  Trauma is the revelation that “the principle of sufficient reason” is no principle at all but only, at best, a wish—and, I will add, though I will not discuss the point here, at worst, and all too often, a nightmare.

As Brison writes (on page 116) a few pages after the passage above, focusing on the notion of the self and referring to her rethinking, after her brother’s suicide, of the nature of recovery from trauma:  “Recovery no longer seems to consist of picking up the pieces of a shattered self (or fractured narrative).  It’s facing the fact that there never was a coherent self (or story) to begin with.”   Once one reaches the point where there is no longer any sense to made, one can at last give up the compulsive struggle to make sense of things, including oneself.

At the point where the struggle to make sense out of trauma breaks down, the option of surrendering that struggle yet continuing to live in the non-sense, the absurdity, finally breaks through.  From that point on, to live in such as way as no longer to avoid the trauma one has undergone, but, rather, to face it—to live, that is, in the truth that dawns in trauma itself–one must live in resistance to any claim that what one has suffered has some redeeming meaning.

The meaning of trauma is that there is no meaning to trauma.  Accordingly, recovering from trauma is learning to reject any attempt to give it one.  Recovering from a trauma requires, finally, refusing to grant the trauma any meaning, and insisting, instead, on its meaninglessness.

It is all “in vain.”

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That includes even the trauma of death itself.  The same observation applies not just to some deaths, but to all of them:  Every death is in vain.  We owe it to the dead to remember that, as I will discuss next.

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #7: The Affirmation of Resistance, Concluded

In my immediately preceding post, I considered examples of resistance from the literature of the survivors of the Nazi camps.  What is most important in all those examples, I argued, is that the “break the frame” of that which they resist.  I pick up the discussion at that point below.

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Indeed, to do justice to what is in play in these examples, which could be supplemented with many others, we need to free ourselves from the notion that resistance is a reactive formation, dependent for its very meaning on the thing that it resists, which thing in that sense takes priority over all resistance to it.   We need, instead, to recognize a peculiar priority of resistance over what it resists.

Interestingly, in their most recent book, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), the final volume of their trilogy that begins with Empire and continues with Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue for just such priority of resistance over the very power it resists.   They base their position on a remark of Foucault’s that power can only be exercised over “free subjects,” since otherwise there would be nothing over which power would need to exert itself.  They quote (on page 59) this remark by Foucault:  “At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.”

A little earlier (on page 56), Hardt and Negri have already noted that throughout his later works Foucault “constantly theorizes an other to power (or even an other power), for which he seems unable to find an adequate name,” but for which “[r]esistance is the term he most often uses.”  However, they observe,  “that term does not really capture what he has in mind, since resistance, as it is generally understood, is too dependent on and subordinate to the power it opposes,” just as Jean-Louis Chrétien seems to understand it in the remark from him I cited earlier.  “In our view,” Hardt and Negri conclude, “the other to power that runs though [Foucault’s works] is best defined as an alternative production of subjectivity, which not only resists power but also seeks autonomy from it.”

Returning to this same point later, they characterize (on page 176) “the conception of resistance” they have posed in the earlier chapters as one in which resistance “is prior to power since power is exercised only over free subjects, and thus, although situated ‘within and against,’ resistance is not condemned to reinforce or repeat the structures of power.”  Then, even later, they return to the point yet a third time, to write (pages 234-235):  “Power can be exercised only over free subjects, and thus the resistance of those subjects is not really posterior to power but an expression of their freedom, which is prior.  Revolt as an exercise of freedom not only precedes but also prefigures the forms that power will take in reaction.”

By such a conception, then, what is crucial to an act of resistance is not what it resists.  What is crucial about such an act is that to which it bears witness in and by resisting whatever it resists.  Furthermore, that to which the act so bears witness is not only prior to, but also more enduring than, any exercise of power that—and this would be the internal structure of all such exercises of power, which one might well, following Hardt and Negri on this point as well, call “sovereign” power—seeks reactively and, therefore, parasitically and ultimately ineffectively, impotently, to suppress it.

It is just such a positive, active sense of the term “resistance” that is necessary to capture what is at issue in the examples of resistance we have considered from the works of Antelme, Laub, and Felman–or, for that matter, in the examples from Améry, Duras, or even the fiction of Alice Walker.  What is at issue is a sense of “resistance” that finds, not the negation that Chrétien and others so often attribute to resistance, but, rather, the affirmation to which he eloquently appeals as the only possible way of ever successfully combating evil.

As Hardt and Negri argue, only such active, affirmative resistance genuinely subverts sovereign power, rather than reinforcing it in the very endeavor to weaken it.  Only such resistance escapes dialectical identity with the very power “within and against” which it works, and the eternal recurrence of that same power under different guises, with a new “ruling power” just replacing an old one, but otherwise leaving everything the same, as always occurs unless such dialectical identity can be broken.  Only it “establishes revolutionary decision making and the overthrow of the ruling power from within,” as Hard and Negri require (page 351), and which explains their preference for “subversion rather than oppositional responses” (page 372).

The active, affirmative, subversive resistance to which not only Hardt and Negri, but also the examples of Améry, Antelme, and the survivors whose testimony Laub and Felman let us hear, point, escapes the otherwise perpetual play and replay of sovereign power by living in the irrelevancy and the impotence of such power.  Such resistance, in fact, laughs at the pretenses of “the ruling power,” just as the crowd in Hans-Christian Anderson’s story laughs at the emperor who has no clothes, once that laughter is released by no more than the simple honesty of a single child who says the truth, which is that the emperor has no clothes.  And, as Hardt and Negri point out on the next to last page of Commonwealth, and therefore of the entire Empire trilogy, “the most adequate response” to “the arrogance of power”–indeed, on the basis of their own three-volume analysis, as well as that of the testimony of such survivors as those just mentioned, I would say the only adequate response—is, “rather than lamenting our poor lot and wallowing in melancholy,” just such “laughter.”

Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #6: The Affirmation of Resistance, Continued

In my preceding post, I discussed the work of Dori Laub, coauthor with Shoshana Felman of a classic work in trauma studies.  In today’s post, I pick up that discussion with some remarks by Felman.

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To bear such witness to the truth of trauma as Laub discusses—even and perhaps especially if it is a “delusional” truth–is itself as such to put up an effective resistance.  Later in their book Testimony, Laub’s coauthor, Shoshana Felman discusses Claude Lanzman’s famous film Shoah.  At one point (page 278), Felman quotes Philip Müller, one of the death-camp survivors interviewed in the film.  Müller had belonged to one of the Sonderkommando, the “special units” of camp prisoners who were allowed to live yet a while longer at the price of being forced to assist the Nazi’s by performing such tasks as keeping fellow prisoners calm as they were being herded to the gas chambers, then cleaning out the mess afterward, so a new contingent of the doomed could be ushered to their deaths in turn. Müller, a Czech, recounts an episode in which he accompanied a group of fellow Czechs to the changing room, where prisoners were made to strip before entering the gas chamber, disguised as a shower-room:

The violence climaxed when they tried to force the people to undress.  A few obeyed, only a handful.  Most of them refused to follow the order.  Suddenly, like a chorus, they all began to sing.  The whole ”undressing room” rang with the Czech national anthem, and the Hatikvah.  That moved me terribly. . .

That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had become meaningless.  Why go on living?  For what?  So I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die.  With them.  Suddenly, some who recognized me came up to  me . . . A small group of women approached.  They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . . :  “So you want to die.  But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives.  That’s no way.  You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to . . . the injustice done to us.”

Concerning this episode, Felman makes the following excellent observation:

The singing . . . signifies a common recognition, by the singers, of the perversity of the deception to which they had been all along exposed, a recognition, therefore, and a facing, of the truth of their imminent death . . . a repossession of their lost truth by the dying singers, an ultimate rejection of the Nazi-instigated self-deception and a deliberately chosen, conscious witnessing of their own death.

She then goes on to note on the very next page (279):  “The singing challenges and dares the Nazis.”   The act of singing, and of thereby bearing witness even in their very dying, embodies resistance among the Czech compatriots about to be gassed.  But for Müller as a member of the Sonderkommando, someone who can survive, at least for the time being, resistance cannot mean giving up his life, even while singing out his defiance.  Rather, for him it has to mean renouncing such very dying—which in this context also entails his continuing to act in apparent complicity with the Nazi killers themselves.

Later in a note to a passage on the same page (n. 52), Felman also quotes yet another Czech survivor, Rudolph Vrba, on his “decision to escape, after the suicide of [fellow inmate and Resistance figure] Freddy Hirsch that aborts the Resistance plan for the uprising of the Czech family camp:  ‘It was quite clear to me then that the Resistance in the camp is not generally for an uprising but for survival of the members of the Resistance.’”

For these two Czech survivors of Auschwitz, Müller and Vrba, continuing to live becomes as such the act of resistance.  For the woman Laub interviews, the “failed” Sonderkommando rebellion at Auschwitz near the end of the war—and even the joy with which she later  (mis)remembers and (mis)recounts it—effects resistance.  For Antelme, resistance is manifest even in the very act of dying, and even the corpses of the dead continue resistance to what the Nazi endeavored in vain to accomplish with all their killing.

So different on the surface—as different as life (in Müller and Vrba) and death (in Antelme)–all these cases are the same in at least two key ways.

First, in them all, the efficaciousness of the resistance they display has nothing to do with what would ordinarily be accounted the success or failure of the enterprise to which the resistance attaches.   So, for example, Müller’s choice to head what the other Czech prisoners about to be gassed tell him, and therefore not to join them in the gas chamber, is as such already fully effective as resistance, and would have remained so, even if Müller had later been gassed or shot in turn, as was the standard Nazi practice for dealing with the members of a Sonderkommando, who only temporarily escaped such a fate.  Similarly, as Laub’s account makes so powerfully clear, that the rebellion at Auschwitz was a “failure” by historians’ standards does not really touch its effectiveness as resistance.  Finally, the corpses of which Antelme speaks constitute a mutely effective resistance even though there is no sense in which they represent the success of any endeavor, including even the endeavor to resist as such.  Rather, their resistance consists in their being at all, at a level that clearly has nothing to do with success or failure of anything.

The second way in which all these diverse cases of resistance are the same is really just the flip-side of what I have called the first way:  They are all the same in that what they do is to “put the lie” to that which they resist, to use Antelme’s way of speaking.  Or, to use Laub’s excellent way of wording it, they all, just as themselves and apart from all ordinary question of the “success” of the resistance they embody,  “break the frame” of that against which they resist.  The Sonderkommando uprising broke the frame of Auschwitz, even if it blew up “only” one smokestack and even if all the rebels were “betrayed” by the Polish underground and almost immediately killed after their rebellion had barely begun.   For that matter, even the joy with which the woman who witnessed the rebellion recounts it, with however many “mistakes” in her recounting, also breaks that frame, just as effectively and completely as the uprising itself did.  Finally, Antelme’s corpses also break it no less.

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.

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To be continued in my next post.