The Image of Sovereignty #4: War-Profiteering in Trauma

What follows is a new section of the draft of a chapter called “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty” for a planned book on trauma and philosophy.

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War-Profiteering in Trauma

It has often been noted that nations can, and frequently do, use traumatic events to legitimate their own aggressive actions, and to maintain popular support for them.   In such cases, trauma conveniently serves the nation–after the fact, as it were—for claiming legitimacy and demanding support for aggressive national actions.   Colin Davis captures well the mechanism employed.  First the spokesperson for the national interest casts the traumatic event as an attack on the nation by some national enemy (which it may well be, as in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941), then casts aggressive action against that enemy as the only appropriate response to that attack, and claims ongoing support for whatever further acts are taken to be necessary for securing the nation against future attack.  “By projecting the violence of society onto an identifiable group of criminals [or the equivalent, such as a “rogue” state or, in general, some supposed enemy of the nation, one should add],” as Davis sums the whole process up in his post-9/11 book Haunted Subjects:  Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2007, page 34), “the forces of order can assure the intelligibility of evil, deny their own responsibility for it, and indulge their inclination to violence in eradicating it.”

One example of such a case is how the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the already mentioned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to justify declaring war on Japan, and then fanned the flames of Americans anger and resentment—and, for that matter, racist prejudice—after the attack to help keep support for the war effort high. The point is not that the attack was somehow fabricated and never really happened.  It certainly did, as has also already been mentioned.  The point, however, is that that attack was immediately de-contextualized in such a way as to obviate any consideration of what part the United States itself may have played in the events leading up to the Japanese action, and any need or desire to pursue any other course of response short of war.  Then recurrent appeal to that “day that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt famously called it in his address to Congress requesting a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack, served to justify the United States in the aggressive prosecution of that war, down to and including dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring Japan to unconditional surrender.

“Such an experience is hardly unusual,” as Robert J. Lifton notes in Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003, page 152), “and could be the experience of any national leader” faced with something similar to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.  “The danger a leader faces,” writes Lifton, “is that of equating a sense of debt to the dead with fierce, amorphous retribution.”  Of course, we should note, from the point of view of such a leader, “fierce amorphous retribution” will rarely if ever appear as a “danger.”  Instead, it will appear as the only appropriate response, and very often even as an important opportunity to consolidate both national and personal power.

At any rate, by Lifton’s analysis the United States, four decades after Pearl Harbor, made just such a use of the attacks of September 11, 2001, to legitimate American invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq, and to try to build support for those actions not only among American citizens themselves, but also among the governments and citizens of its allies and beyond.  As Lifton observes, the Bush administration and its many supporters took the idea that after 9/11 the entire nation owed a “debt to the dead, and to the immediate survivors representing them,” and “instantly transformed [that idea] into a strong impulse toward retaliative action.”  The rush into war against Afghanistan and then against Iraq amply confirms Lifton’s diagnosis.

What is more, such manipulation of trauma for justifying subsequent national decisions and actions often also bolsters itself by analogizing the most recent trauma with earlier ones that had been successfully manipulated for similar purposes in the past.  So, for example, in his editor’s introduction to the collection of essays that make up Memory, Trauma, and World Politics (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006) international relations scholar Duncan Bell calls attention to how this occurred after 9/11.  As he writes (page 14):      “In post 9/11 [American] public life memories of both Vietnam and the attack on Pearl Harbor have been invoked repeatedly and for multiple and often contradictory reasons.”  As a demonstration, Bell goes on to cite President George W. Bush in a speech delivered to the cadets at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on June 24, 2004, almost three years after the 9/11 attacks.  “Like the Second World War,” said Bush on that occasion in Bell’s citation, “our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.”   Then he drew an implicit parallel between his administrations response to the 9/11 attacks and the Roosevelt administration’s earlier response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by adding:  “We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.”  He then even proceeded to conflate the 9/11 attacks with state-sponsored violence, such as, for example, the Nazi genocide against Jews:   “Like the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, the ideology of terrorism reaches across borders, and seeks recruits in every country.  So we’re fighting these enemies wherever they hide across the earth.”

Later in Bell’s collection of essays, K. M. Fierke, another scholar of international relations, follows Hannah Arendt’s well-known analysis in Eichman in Jerusalem in arguing that Israeli prime minister and national hero David Ben-Gurion similarly used the Eichman trial in 1961 to reinforce the idea that there was a direct and unbreakable connection between the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel.  So, Fierke observes (page 127 in Bell’s book):  “The experience of the Holocaust was woven into Israeli identity, rather than [Ben-Gurion and Israel] distancing it [that is, the Holocaust] in the past.”

Ironically, Ben-Gurion’s use of the Holocaust thereby follows the model of Hitler himself, who, in his manipulation of the widespread “stab in the back” myth popularly subscribed to by many Germans at the time, “called on the trauma of [German] defeat in the first World War and the humiliation of the Versailles treaty, in mobilizing an existential threat to German society, to the end of making Germany great once again.”  As if to confirm again the frequency with which such manipulations of trauma occur, and how they continue to recur all too frequently in recent history, rather than being relegated to earlier epochs, Fierke prefaces her remark about Hitler with one about how Slobodan Milosevic used the very same sort of manipulation of memories of trauma to justify Serbian aggression during the 1990s.

The example of the Nazi exploitation of the myth of the “stab in the back” is worth a bit more reflection.  According to that myth the Germans were supposed to have lost World War I not through any lack on the part of the German military or the leadership of the Wilhelmine Reich in general, but by being subverted from within by the Social Democrats and other leftist forces, those very figures to whom fell the responsibility to declare and then uphold what came to be known as the Weimar Republic after the German collapse and surrender in November 1918.  Unlike the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor twenty-three years later, which actually did take place, no such “stab in the back” ever occurred.  The whole thing was indeed no more than a manufactured “myth,” in the sense of a false story.  That the whole thing was made up, however, proved to be an advantage, not a disadvantage, for the right wing elements in German politics and society, including especially the Nazis.  The idea of such a “stab in the back” was not a claim based on evidence in the first place.  It was, rather, solely a symptomatic expression of the very anguish, resentments, and fears upon which it played.  As with any such delusion, any evidence adduced against it was automatically reinterpreted and converted into yet further confirmation of the pseudo-thesis at issue.  Not based on evidence to begin with, such a delusional idea can never be refuted by any appeal to contrary evidence.  Accordingly, it can be freely exploited by any interest able to adapt it to its own purposes, as the Nazis easily adapted the myth of the stab in the back to gain and hold power.

Furthermore, it is common knowledge that, once in power, Hitler was also not in the least averse to inventing new myths of traumatic attacks upon Germany whenever necessary to justify his aggressions.  The ramp-up to what became World War II was full of examples of such a process, which culminated in the Nazis trumping up the fake border incident of a Polish attack on a German radio installation as a pretense for invading Poland at the beginning of September in 1939.  Thus, traumatic events are so useful to a political leader’s pursuit of national or even personal goals that, if chance does not present one, the leader will have to invent one, as the President in the film Wag the Dog fakes a war to boost his popularity and secure his own reelection.

Even if the traumatic event diverted to serve such extraneous ends “really happened,” as did the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, drafting that event into public service by what presents itself as the national interest has the effect of transforming the event into a myth.  In that sense, even such otherwise egregiously offensive claims as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s that the Holocaust is a “myth,” touch on a truth—the truth, namely, that employing trauma to serve power is itself already a falsifying distortion, a fiction-spinning and myth-making.   By shanghaiing it for service in what they take to be the national interests of the state of Israel, for example, Ben-Gurion and the other Israeli leaders perverted remembrance of the Holocaust into a mere myth even before Ahmadinejad and other Holocaust deniers came along.  Indeed, the already accomplished perversion of the traumatic truth of the Holocaust into a state-justifying myth actually helped to open, and still helps keep open, a door through which those who would deny the reality of the Holocaust can come.

That transformation of the trauma of the Holocaust into no more than another sorry story of the exercise of the power of the state exemplifies the second, and indeed decisive, way in which the nation-state turns a profit on trauma.  The first way, that in which an already established state uses a serendipitous traumatic event—that is, one occurring by a chance that is fortunate at least for the state—to justify state-enacted violence, has been the focus of this section of the current chapter.  The second, decisive way, in which trauma is used not to justify aggression by already constituted states but, rather, to justify the foundation of the state in the first place, will be the topic in the next section.

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.

Our Debt to the Dead #2: Heidegger’s Guilt

Having discussed influential psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of a positive, healthy, morally mature sense of having a “debt to the dead” in my preceding post, in today’s post I discuss Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt in Being and Time.

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In Being and Time Heidegger argues that “being guilty” (Schuldigsein) is a primordial existential determination of what he calls Dasein, his name for the human being, which is commonly left in the German even in English translations of his work.  That is, far from guilt being a condition one acquires only on occasion, by acting contrary to how one “should” act, being guilty belongs, by his analysis, to the very being of a human being, the being of “being-there” or Dasein (da: there; and sein: to be). According to him, it is only because Dasein always already is guilty, that it is even possible for it to become “guilty” in the derivative sense of having committed some violation of some moral or social law or rule—become guilty, in short, through failure to do one’s “duty,” to do what one “should” or “ought to” do.

It is interesting to note that, like Lifton, Heidegger supports his analysis in part by referring to the etymology of the word guilt (Schuld, in German).  The root of that term means “to owe,” “to be owing to. ”  In that sense, then, it means precisely to be in debt—namely, in debt to whatever or whomever one owes whatever it is that one owes.

In the everyday—but, for Heidegger, derivative–usage of the term ‘guilt,’ one acquires guilt by being the cause or agent of a violation of duty, broadly conceived.   So understood, being guilty is not at all definitive for being human at all.  Rather, it is an occasional state or condition acquired through specific acts (including failures to act) of a certain sort.  The “debt” connected to guilt is a debt accrued by such actions, and is, therefore, at least in principle something that could be “paid off” by some sort of payment, whether in pounds sterling or in pounds of flesh.

Such everyday usage clearly still accords well enough with the original, etymological meaning of the term ‘debt.’  In effect, contemporary usage just limits the notion of being in debt, of owing something, to cases in which the debt at issue is incurred by one’s own specific choices and actions, or at least to debts capable of being paid off in one fashion or another.  So, to give an example relevant to my concerns in this chapter, just such an understanding of debt would be in play in any account of so called “ancestor worship” that treated such worship as an attempt to keep the spirits of ancestors well disposed toward oneself or one’s society by making them payments in the way of sacrifices of various sorts, from firstborn children to fumes of incense or ejaculatory prayers.

In contrast, both Heidegger’s and Lifton’s analyses of guilt suggest a very different account of the nature of debt as such–and, accordingly, a very different account of what is at issue in supposed ancestor worship.  Certainly by Heidegger’s analysis–and, if I am right, also by Lifton’s–guilt, precisely as indebtedness, is not a condition acquired after the fact as a consequence of making certain choices or acting in certain ways.  Rather, it is part and parcel of being human, as such:  To be a human being is to be guilty, indebted, before and apart from any specific choices one might make or fail to make, or actions one might perform or fail to perform.

It follows, as well, that such guilt or indebtedness can never, in principle, be “paid off.”  Insofar as it defines the very being of the human being as such, even the payment of one’s own life could never write “paid” over the debt at issue.  No conceivable payment, no matter how large or difficult to make, could ever close one’s account and put one in good standing, as it were.

It is perhaps worthwhile to take a few moments to contrast the notion of guilt and debt that emerges in Lifton and Heidegger with another analysis of guilt with which it might seem to be similar:  the famous/infamous analysis of human guilt and indebtedness to God first fully articulated by St. Anselm in the 11^th century, and still very much alive today within large parts both of Catholicism and of evangelical Protestantism—an idea that finds popular expression billboards and bumper stickers that proclaim “Christ died for your sins.”   In line with such an idea, the supposed “fall” of humanity through Adam, the fall from grace by and into sin, is something by which human beings acquire an “infinite” debt to God.  By the principle that full payment must be equivalent to what is owed, however, an infinite debt could only be paid off with an infinite payment, which is, in turn, a payment that only a being that was itself infinite could ever possibly pay.  Accordingly, in order to pay the infinite debt incurred by sin, and thus liberate humanity from the burden of an otherwise un-relievable burden, it was necessary for the infinite God to become incarnate in Jesus and then to take on, as a sort of infinite scapegoat, all the infinite burden of sin, in order that, in His death on the cross, he could then pay Himself the infinite “ransom” demanded to liberate humanity from captivity in its own sin, and to reconcile it to Himself.

However, in contrast, Lifton’s and Heidegger’s analyses suggest, as I read them, that the debt the living owe the dead is one that even an infinite God could never pay.  To capture what is at issue, we might say that the debt in question is infinite in the sense of unending, taken strictly.  That is, it is in-finite in the sense of being literally without end–alternatively worded, it is ever ongoing.   To put the point paradoxically, even if God were to pay himself an infinite payment (as “ransom”) for the infinite debt of human sinfulness, humanity would still not be free of debt.  It would still not receive any “get out of jail” card in the game of divine monopoly.  Humanity’s debt to God would still be infinite, even after such an infinite payment.  It would just keep going on.  The debt would just keep “carrying over,” and the “balance due” would remain infinite.

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It may be helpful at this point to note that, more than twenty years after the publication of Being and Time, in what was eventually published under the title of  “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger explicitly connected the notion of “indebtedness” (Schulden) to the ancient philosophical doctrine of four-fold causation.  Indeed, he uses the very term Schuld (debt/guilt) to capture what, according to him, is at stake in the ancient Greek notion of “aitia,” normally translated as “cause.”   He says, in short, that what the Greeks meant by aitia was precisely that to which whatever was at issue was, in effect, owing.

In colloquial English, we often use ‘owing to’ in the way Heidegger has in mind.  For example, in the fall of 2008, after a summer of record gas prices, many families across the United States might well have said that “owing to the price of gas” they had not taken any long summer vacation trips.  Furthermore, though present usage of the term ‘cause’ is much more restricted than was the case for ancient Greek usage of the term aitia, it still does not sound especially strange to say that the cost of gas “caused” the families at issue to stay home.  If asked why they took no trips, such families might well say that it was “because” of the cost of gas:  be-cause of the price of gasoline–that is, by cause of it—they remained at home.

In that broad sense of the term, whereby a cause of an occurrence is anything that contributes to answering the question of “why” it happened, the causes of a given occurrence are the factors owing to which it occurred.  The event owes its very occurrence to those factors, and is in that sense indebted to them.

An occurrence solely as such, however, is not itself “accountable” in its indebtedness—accountable “for” itself “to” the factors to which it is indebted.  In contrast, it is not merely as being indebted—in the sense of “being owing to,” as just addressed, in which “being indebted” is characteristic of anything whatever—but also as being accountable for their debts to their “debtors” that human beings are guilty.

Heidegger expresses this by saying that Dasein not only “is” a “null basis” of itself, but also itself “has to be” that null basis—that is, it “has” that null basis “to be,” in accordance with Heidegger’s general formulation to the effect that Dasein never simply “is” whatever it is, but always has being whatever it is “as an issue,” or “at issue,” for itself, and in that sense always “has its being [whatever it “is”] to be.”  That is what Heidegger in Being and Time labels the “existence” (“ek-sistence”:  literally, standing out from itself) of Dasein.

Consequently, when he eventually gets around to discussing guilt, Heidegger offers a definition whereby guilt is:  “having to be the null basis of a nullity.”  For my purposes here–and based on Heidegger’s own discussion of guilt or debt (Schuld), indebtedness (being-in-debt, or being-guilty:  Schuldig-sein), and debts (Schulden )–being guilty can be taken to mean not merely being indebted or owing to something or someone,  but in addition to be accountable for the debt at issue.  In that sense, the debt at issue is a debt that lies at the very heart of the being of the person, prior to—and first making possible at all—the incurring of any debt or indebtedness in the more limited sense, where it is only through actions or failures to act that one can accrue guilt.  Thus, even before and apart from any actions we might take or fail to take, we are not only always in debt but also always accountable for it.  As such, we always must and always do–one way or another, like it or not–take up that debt, assuming it, as it were.

In our accountability for our always inescapable indebtedness, to give an accounting is always part of our standing debt:  We always  “owe an accounting” of our debt to—we are “accountable” to–whatever or whomever we are “owing” in the first place.  Thus, first and above all one is accountable for any given debt to whomever or whatever one owes whatever it is that one owes—to whomever or whatever gave it to one in the first place:  one’s “debtor” or “creditor” for the debt in question.  Thus, for example, in one line of one old version of the Christian prayer to “Our Father,” one prays to God the Father explicitly as to just such a creditor, asking that God “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  More mundanely, the bank that carries the mortgage on my home is my creditor for the sum of money involved (plus interest, of course); and I am a debtor in relation to them for that sum.

It is at least conceivable, however unlikely, that the bank holding the mortgage on my home might at some time forgive me that particular debt.  If we are to believe many of the “believers” among us, then God does indeed forgive us the debts to Him we incur by “sin”—though there is disagreement among such believers about whether God must first be asked to forgive us the debt of our sins, as there is about the details required for the transaction.  For example, there is disagreement among Christians about whether the Incarnation and Passion of Christ was the price that God had to pay Himself to “ransom” us from His own clutches, as Saint Anselm says.

To stay for a moment with that same Christian example, it remains a matter of debate among Christians whether the indebtedness at issue, namely, the indebtedness incurred by “sin,” is so incurred by our specific, chosen actions and failures to act, or whether it is part and parcel of our being born in the first place.  Whatever may be the resolution of that dispute among Christians, if there is any final resolution possible, the mere fact that there is such dispute points to an issue concerning guilt and debt that has more than Christian significance.  That is the issue of how to address the indebtedness revealed by the preceding analysis, informed by Lifton’s and Heidegger’s works.  How are we to address that indebtedness incurred by the very fact that we are born at all, an inescapable indebtedness which is implicated in our very being, before and apart from any indebtedness of a more limited sort that one might incur by one’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to purchase a home on credit, or the act of stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree (as Augustine famously did)?

I will discuss that question in the next section of this chapter.

Our Debt to the Dead #1: Robert J. Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt (Beginning a New Chapter and Closing, Belatedly and with Apologies, an Old One)

Today I begin posting the draft of a new chapter–the third so far–for what I plan to be eventually a book on trauma and philosophy.  This chapter has the tentative title of “Our Debt to the Dead.”

I also want to apologize to readers, for an unintentional omission in a recent series of posts.  Only while preparing the post for today did I realize that I had somehow never finished posting what should have been the penultimate post of the series I devoted to the first of the three chapters just mentioned.  I have now at last posted that entry, which can be found at this blog-site under the title “Responding to Trauma #7:  Rebecca Solnit and Building Paradise in Hell, Continued,”  published just yesterday (October 22).  Interested readers might want to go back and begin with the post “Responding to Trauma #6,” for the start of my discussion of Solnit’s recently published book A Paradise Built in Hell.

What follows below is the opening of my draft for the new chapter, on what we owe the dead.

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Our Debt to the Dead

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” – James Joyce, Dubliners

Robert Jay Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt

“One kind of anxiety is a sense of guilt,” writes influential psychologist Robert Jay Lifton to begin an analysis of guilt in Broken Connections:  Death and Life Continuity e (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1979, page 132).   What Lifton says about guilt is in the context of his decades-long research on survivors of such public, historically significant traumas as the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima at the end of World War II or of the American debacle in Viet Nam a few decades later.  With regard to the latter, Lifton played a crucial role in the development of the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and in eventually gaining official recognition of PTSD as a distinct diagnostic category, signaled by its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980.

“Guilt feelings,” he goes on to observe, “like other forms of anxiety, are associated with psychological pain and many kinds of psychopathology.”  Lifton’s own concern with guilt, however, is not so much with pathological manifestations of it as it is with guilt’s healthy forms.  Thus, immediately after noting the connection between guilt and psychopathology, he writes that “guilt can also serve as a signal that the integrity of the organism, or moral integrity, is threatened.”  Thus, he concludes:  “It follows that the capacity for guilt is necessary and useful on the one hand, and a potential source of severe psychological harm on the other.”

Significantly, when Lifton turns to the topic of what has commonly come to be known as “survivor guilt,” that is, the guilt that survivors of a trauma that strikes others as well as themselves often experience toward those who did not survive, he does not relegate such guilt, as one might expect, to the second camp, that of unhealthy manifestations of guilt.  That is, he does not treat survivor guilt as a subset of pathological guilt, as tends to occur in contemporary popular psychological accounts of the phenomenon, where feeling guilt for surviving a traumatic event is typically treated as no more than a malady to be overcome, or at best a stage of the healing process–at any rate not as something that characterizes mature psychological health itself.

However, the contrary idea, that survivor guilt as such does indeed belong to mature psychological health, is just what Lifton’s analysis ultimately suggests.  Instead of relegating survivor guilt to the pathological side of phenomena of guilt, Lifton draws the distinction between the healthy and the pathological within survivor guilt itself.  Thus, while not at all denying that survivor guilt can and often does indicate an underlying psychopathology, Lifton also insists that it can sometimes indicate psychological—and moral—vitality and health.

As he presents it inThe Broken Connection, it is precisely his own earlier work with cases of guilt in survivors of the atom bomb explosion over Hiroshima at the end of World War II, as well as his work two to three decades later with American veterans of the war in Vietnam, which gives Lifton his guiding clues for characterizing not just survivor guilt, but even guilt in general.  In effect, he de-pathologizes survivor guilt by placing it in the perspective of the larger view of guilt he derives from his earlier work with survivors.

The crucial step in Lifton’s analysis is to focus upon survivor guilt in terms of the inexpugnable sense of a debt to the dead that survivors commonly experience.    In turn, against the not uncommon tendency to treat the sense of debt toward the dead as itself mere evidence of immature or superstitious belief, he articulates the position that, as he puts it at the end of the chapter on guilt in The Broken Connection (page 146), “[i]ndividuation itself demands that the young organism…indeed develop the capacity for a debt to the dead…”

Two pages earlier (144), Lifton is careful to note:  “The image of a debt to the dead conveys the idea of something one owes, a duty, an obligation, a matter in which there is some form of accountability.”  That last word, ‘accountability,’ provides the key for understanding Lifton’s entire analysis, in my judgment.  For him, the notion of debt is not to be read as a reduction of the idea of moral accountability or responsibility to some sort of economic exchange, as it is widely taken to be, especially in “deconstructive” accounts.  Rather than arguing that the idea of a debt to the dead involves a sort of economicization of the idea of guilt, as occurs in such accounts, Lifton, as I read him, suggests that what is really in play is a de-economicization of the idea of debt, in which the very notion of economic debt gets read back into the broader moral context of accountability or responsibility.

What is more, I do not think it does injustice to Lifton’s thought to remark that the tendency of his analysis is precisely to divorce the notion of debt, specifically of debt to the dead, from any attempt to treat such debt as something that could ever even potentially be “discharged.”  That is, debt to the dead in the sense at issue for him as I read him is nothing that could ever possibly be “paid off,” leaving the living no longer indebted, and thereby freeing them to go on about their business, content in the good conscience of having repaid their debts to, and squared their accounts with, the dead.

Rather, the sense of debt to the dead to which Lifton’s analysis points is a debt that is un-payable in principle.  It is a debt that can never be discharged and which, more importantly, is misunderstood as soon as it is treated in terms of any possibility of paying it off.  Indeed, I would argue that it is not pushing things too far to say that such “misunderstanding” is an all too motivated, self-serving one for those who entertain it:  The attempt to reduce one’s debt to the dead to something that might somehow someday be paid off, is actually the crucial attempt to shirk that very debt, to renege on it–in short, to cheat the dead of what one owes them.

However, the dead are remorseless, as it were.  They never forgive the debt the living owe them.  Nor do they ever “write off their losses.”  Instead, they stubbornly insist on asserting their claim on the living.   The dead are inexorable creditors.

By Lifton’s analysis the morally mature, healthy individual is, then, not someone who has somehow managed to pay her debt to the dead.  Rather, even to think in terms that would allow one to make sense of the notion of ever writing “paid” to the living’s debt to the dead would be a reliable sign of moral immaturity.  In contrast, the morally mature and healthy individual would be someone who holds tightly to the knowledge that her debt to the dead can never be discharged, never be paid or made good.  It is a debt, instead, that must be constantly borne.

Today, such a view seems completely counter-intuitive.  It runs head on against some currently basic notions concerning debts, indebtedness, and the payment of debts.  So deeply has the common contemporary understanding economicized the notion of debt that the very idea of the sort of debt Lifton’s analysis suggests we owe the dead–a debt the sum of which cannot be calculated and for which no balancing of accounts would ever be possible—such a notion seems to be sheer non-sense, a violation of the very meaning of the term ‘debt.’  A debt that could never even conceivably be paid, with however large a sum of payments, seems void of all sense, given current dominant understandings.

It also runs counter to the still widespread idea of the foolishness, the childishness–the “primitive” nature–of all “ancestor worship” and “ancestor religion.”  Contrary to such derogation of ancestor worship, if Lifton is right in the general direction of his thinking about debts to the dead, then ancestor worship could well bear witness to the good and mature moral sense of those who practiced it, rather than to their moral immaturity.

But what sort of a bizarre debt would it be, that could never in principle be paid off, and that is owed to those no longer even living?  Could it be anything more than a poor wordplay to talk of such a wholly non-indemnifiable debt?

In my judgment, Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt and debt in Being and Time can help to answer that question, as I will discuss in the next section of this chapter.

Lifton and “Superpower Syndrome” Continued

6/22/09

This is the second post on Robert J. Lifton’s Super Power Syndrome–and the last of a series of eight consecutive posts overall about his thought.

 

Friday, November 21, 2008

Lifton, p. 152, on Bush’s response right after 9/11: 

The debt to the dead, and to the immediate survivors representing them, was instantly transformed into a strong impulse toward retaliative action.  Such a sequence is hardly unusual, and could be the experience of any national leader.  The danger a leader faces is that of equating a sense of debt to the dead with fierce, amorphous retribution.”

P. 175:  The Bush vision of spreading “freedom” and “democracy” across the globe is, in Lifton’s analysis, one of “fluid world control, . . . nothing less than an inclusive claim to the ownership of history.”  “Yet,” as he observes a few pages later (p. 178),

a sense of megalomania and omnipotence,  whether in an individual or a superpower, must sooner or later lead not to glory but collapse.  The ownership of history is a fantasy in the extreme.  Infinite power and control is a temptation that is as self-destructive as  it is dazzling–still another  version of the ownership  of death.

And, as he importantly notes later on that same page, such dreams/assertions of (fantastic) power tend to be underlain by “profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness.”  He even more powerfully concludes that paragraph as follows:  “Fear of being out of control can lead to  the most aggressive efforts at total control of everyone else.”

Robert J. Lifton on “Superpower Syndrome”

6/19/09

Following up on the series of my six preceding posts on Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, this is the first of two posts on a later work of the same author, written after 9/11–Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003).  I first wrote the entry below in my philosophical journal on the date indicated.

 

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Lifton, Super Power Syndrome, p. 19:  “The image of apocalypse has been so much with us because we are meaning-hungry creatures who know that we die, and we fervently seek a place for our deaths in the cosmic order.  Individual deaths, when associated with the death and rebirth of the world, can take on special significance and high nobility.”

Against that, the acknowledgement that all death is in vaincould help.  [That is my observation, not Lifton's.]

P. 22–When apocalyptic ideas take on an interventionist activism:

The evil being confronted is viewed as something like an enemy army, which must not only be defeated but, since ever ready to regroup, annihilated.  For that task one requires what the writer James Carroll calls “god-sponsored violence”–violence that is both unlimited and holy.  As individuals and as a group, then, apocalyptics merge with God in the claim to ownership of death.  That is, they claim the right not only to murderous purification but to make all judgments concerning who is to die and who is to be permitted to survive.  This ownership of death comes to include ownership of meaning and of all aspects of life.

Perhaps all claims to ownership finally involve, as their inner sense, the claim to such ownership of death.

 

Pp. 140-141, on “what I call death guilt (frequently termed ‘survivor guilt’)”: 

Death guilt has to do with others dying and not oneself, or with remaining alive when one  has been close to death (and was “supposed” to die).  It has to do with what I would call failed enactment:  one’s inability at the moment of the disaster to act in the way one would have expected of oneself (saving people, resisting the  perpetrators), or even to have experienced the expectable and appropriate emotions (strong compassion for victims, rage toward perpetrators).  Death guilt begins with, and is sustained by, this “failure”; the memory can be endlessly repeated psychologically, and although somewhat ameliorated over time, is never completely erased.

As this passage indicates (and as Lifton suggests even more strongly in a note at the bottom of the same page, where he writes:  “There has been much confusion over ‘survivor guilt’ and related terms because they can be erroneously understood to suggest actual  wrongdoing, as opposed to guilt feelings, which are psychological manifestations of self-condemnation, however undeserved”), in this recent work, Lifton drops what I take to be fruitful indications in his earlier book Broken Connections that “survivor guilt” is a non-pathological form–or at least can be–of guilt, rather than involving a split between experienced and “real” guilt.

Here, then, he falls back on an equation of guilt with “wrongdoing.”  Thus, in the very next line on p. 141 he writes, “Guilt feelings [of "death guilt"] are closely bound up with a sense of debt to the dead, a debt that can never quite be repaid.”  So, here, he splits “guilt” and “debt,” which he connected, on the basis of their common etymological German root [the common root of Schuld (guilt) and Schulden (debts)], in Broken Connections.

Killing to Heal: Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi Doctors, #6

6/17/09

Below is my final journal entry, first written on the date indicated, dealing with Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors.  Before leaving Lifton, in my next two posts I will ,share some reflections on a later work of his on September11, 2001, and its aftermath.

 

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Lifton (p 467) on developing “the paradigm of death and the continuity of life–or the  symbolization of life and death–that [based on Otto Rank's work] I have been employing in this book and in other works over several decades” to apply to genocide.  To that end, to “the central  tenet of that model” in accordance with which, a propos genocide at least, “human beings kill in order to assert their own life power,” he now adds “the image of curing a deadly disease, so that genocide may become an absolute form of killing in the name of  healing.”

It is worth noting that the “model” or “paradigm” he is using also applies, at least in its “central tenet” to addiction [which entails, however, no sort of moral equivalent between the two:  as I will later discuss, the moral difference between genocide and addiction is huge].   That is, both genocide and addiction would be rooted in the need “to assert [the  addict's and/or the killer's] own life power” (the “control” of  “my control  disease” of addiction [as therapist J. Keith Miller describes his own alcoholism].

What is more, as Lifton explicitly argues a bit earlier in the book (pp. 447-451), the “omnipotence” that genocidal killers such as, emblematically (because of “killing to heal”), the Nazi Auschwitz doctors experience when killing–that (p. 447) “sense of omnipotent control over the live and deaths” of its victims–wavers with “the seemingly opposite sense of impotence, of being a powerless cog in a vast machine controlled by unseen others.”  Indeed,  it is clear that, in general, any killing in order to heal must, in my language, disappropriate itself of (or dis-own) its own inner sense (direct intentionality, as it  were) as killing.  That is why the exercise of power in such a way is wracked internally by its “opposite,” the sense of powerlessness.  That would occur whenever a split of the direct, inner intentionality of means and ends occurs.

And just such a split also occurs in addiction, in that the very way the addict experiences as the only available avenue for asserting her own “life power” is by subjecting herself (note:  not just “being subjected to,” but, exactly, “subjecting oneself to,” since otherwise it would be no means of exercising power or control at all) to undergoing the activity of the drug or drug-equivalent upon her.  Thus, in addiction, too, there is this same central wavering between power and powerlessness.

Also common to  genocide and addiction is insatiability:  No amount of killing for the one who kills in the name of healing will ever be enough–enough to eliminate all “infection” and “disease” and risk thereof–any more than any amount of alcohol is ever enough for what, following Lipton’s talk of the Nazi doctor’s “Auschwitz self,” we might call an alcoholic’s alcoholic-self. 

But perhaps the key to a crucial differentiation lies here, in the “insatiability” of both genocidal killer and addict.  That is, why the one is insatiable may be significantly different from why the other is ”insatiable.”  The  difference may, indeed, be there, along the axis of the active/reactive distinction that Deleuze makes central in his reading of Nietzsche.

In effect, it may come down to  the insatiability of the genocidal killer being reactive, whereas that of the addict is active.  Genocide, insofar as it requires the attribution of generative power–power generative of the very efforts of healing that come to consist in killing–to what is other than itself.  The point to extract from that is not just that genocidal action is only called forth by the irruption of “infection” or “disease,” which really becomes the tautology that healing efforts are only called forth in response or “reaction” to illness.  The point is, rather, that at the very heart of genocide lies coiled the fundamental experience of powerlessness–better:  the experience of fundamental powerlessness:  the experience of oneself as not powerful, but as, instead, the mere pawn of what does have power.  Genocide would be reactive, then, because it would emerge, not directly from and/or as the assertion of one’s own power or “vitality” (to use a language closer to the Nazis’ own) but as avoidance of the recognition of one’s own powerlessness.  But since the very endeavor to deny, disavow, or avoid something that is experienced as definitive of one’s very selfhood–here, the radical experiential impotence of the killer in the face of  what he must kill, because it has power over him–the very powerlessness one is trying to avoid by genocide is incorporated or institutionalized within genocidal action itself:  Hence the more one kills, the less power one feels, which means the more one has to go on killing.

In contrast, addiction is at root an assertion of one’s power or vitality as such. It involves the direct experience of such power, the exercise of it in the only way experientially open to one, under addictionogenic circumstances.  That would be why one could bottom out in addiction, whereas genocide is bottomless.

Hence, too, there would be a corresponding differentiation of what could constitute “recovery.”  In the case of addiction, as active, what ultimately needs to be recovered, in the sense of regained, is the authentic power that has been covered over or concealed by external circumstances, experienced (falsely) as somehow depriving one of power.  Paradoxically, here it is precisely by the full acknowledgement of one’s powerlessness that one finds oneself re-invested with power–though now genuine power, no longer distorted as having anything to do with externalities at all.

In contrast, “recovery” for a genocidal healer-killer (and, as a side note, Lifton’s noteworthy insight that genocide as such involves killing to heal is also worth reversing, insofar as it ponts to a necessarily genocide-engendeging capacity that lies essentially in modern medicine as such–to which much of Lifton’s own work, as well as [Pat] Barker’s Regeneration-trilogy attests [the subject of an earlier series of posts at this blogsite]) involves full acknowledgement or recognition, not of powerlessness as such, but of one’s anxiety-driven avoidance or disavowal of responsibility.

That’s why giving up the illusion of control  starts the addict toward recovery, whereas it is precisely the genocidal killer’s illusion of lack of control–and, hence, blaming others and demonizing them–that must first be abandoned, if any recovery is even to become possible.  That recovery as such, in fact, would only begin at the bottom of whatever processes one might then, after the confession of guilt connected with one’s own actions as a killer (actual or potential), fall into, in now trying to exert control over oneself in some addictive practice.

It may even be that recovery from healer-killing is actually not possible at all!  Here may be, at last, “absolute evil,” now seen to be reaction as such.

After his characterization, above, of his life-continuity model, Lifton writes(p. 467):  “The model I propose [for genocide] includes a perception of collective illness, a vision of cure, and a series of motivations, experiences, and requirements of  perpetrators in this quest  for that cure.”  A couple of pages later (468-470), he presents Germany after WW I and Turkey before the genocide against the Armenians as sharing just such a perception/interpretation of the “national” situation as such an “illness,” which must then be “cured” by atacking the supposed external “causes”–the Jews for the Nazis and the Armenians for the Turkish nationalists in 1915.

It is noteworthy that here, in these genocide-engendering situations, the  perpetrators of the coming genocide begin by inerpreting the situation as an “illness,” and by then projecting the source of that illness onto the selected “other” who has “invaded” the body of the Volk or nation.  In contrast, the addict does not at all begin by seeing her situaion as an illness.  Rather, the addiction seems to be the “solution” to whatever problem is at issue.  And only once the addict can be given the idea that the addiction is some ”malady” or “illness,” as Bill Wilson always called alcoholism, does recovery begin.  In the case of the genocidal killer, actual or  potential, it is all but the reverse:  Only by giving up the interpretation that the  problem lies in some illness–e.g., the “stab in the back” purportedly involved in German  defeat in WW I–and acknowledging, instead, that the purported problem is self-engendered, does the genocide have any chance at “recovery.”  That is, so to speak, the genocide must begin at the fourth column of the 4th step [of AA's twelve steps, where one must examine one's own "fault" in the situation being analyzed], whereas the addict must first get there by taking the first three steps.

Lifton, p. 470:

The stage of sickness [with which genocide begins], then, includes the experience of collective loss and death immersion; the promise of redemptive revitalization, including total merging of self with a mystical collectivity; the absolute failure of that promise, followed by newly intensified experience of collective death imagery and death equivalents; leading in turn to a hunger for a “cure” commensurate in its totality [it is what he then calls "the vision of a total cure" that comes into play] with the “sickness.”

 

P. 473:  “Totalism in a nation state, then, is most likely to emerge as a cure for a death-haunted illness; and victimization, violence, and genocide are potential aspects of that cure.”

 

Also pointing to the reactive nature of genocide is what Liftgon writes on p. 479:  “Hence, the parallel imagery in genocide:  the bearer of deathly disease threatens one’s own people with extinction so one must absolutely extinguish him first.”  Thus, the genocidal killer begins with the perception of himself as a victim.

So, for example, did and does the Republican conservative such as Bush or McCain paint the US as a victim of “Islamic terrorists.”

Killing to Heal: Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi Doctors, #5

6/15/09

Below is another entry from my philosophical journal–first written on the date indicated–on Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. 

 

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Lifton’s analysis in The Nazi Doctors is excellent and important.  That is especially true of one of his closing chapters–the one he calls “Doubling:  The Faustian Bargain” (the first of three chapters in his third and final part, “The Psychology of Genocide”).  The whole chapter is well worth reflection.  Here are just some of my initial responses.

Lifton writes (p. 418):  “One is always ethically responsible for Faustian bargains–a responsibility in no way abrogated by the fact that much doubling takes place outside of awareness. . . . For the individual  Nazi doctor in Auschwitz, doubling was likely to  mask a choice for evil.”  This remark, with its insistence that responsibility extends even into what lies outside awareness (i.e., even to what is “unconscious”) opens upon a whole  new way of beginning to think through the notion of responsibility.  As the analysis he goes on to provide suggests, what needs to be brought into play in such a rethinking is a matter of the personal, egoistic “pay-off, in effect, of acting in a certain way and [that is already in play], most crucially, in the very structuring of awareness–of what will and will not come into awareness in the first place.  Along those lines he remarks,  for example (p. 419), “a major function of doubling, as in Auschwitz, is likely to be the avoidance of guilt:  the second self seems to be the one performing the ‘dirty work.’ “

He goes on to differentiate “doubling” from “splitting,” but how he does so does not seem fully clear to  me.  I wonder if the key to the difference between the two  might not well be that “doubling,” as the last line I quoted just above suggests, would involve self-justifying, self-interested (in the proper sense:  a matter of “looking out for number one,” in effect) motives such as avoiding the sense of guilt, whereas “splitting”–the sort of thing abuse victims do when they “dissociate” (which term he mentions himself)–is a matter of self-preservation, to put it in short.  (Self-preservation as such entails no special  investment in “selfish interests.”)

Thus, on the very next page (420) he goes on himself to write: 

In general psychological terms the adaptive  potential for doubling [here clearly being used to name what is structurally common to "doubling" in the narrower sense I'm suggesting, where it's coupled to self-interested justification, and "splitting"] is integral to the human psyche and can, at times,  be life saving:  for a soldier in combat, for instance; or for a victim of brutality such as an Auschwitz inmate, who must also undergo a form of doubling [i.e., what I'd suggest be called, not "doubling" at all, but "splitting," following his  own distinction on the preceding page] in order to survive.  Clearly, the “opposing self” can be life enhancing [i.e., life preserving,  I'd say].  But under certain conditions it can embrace evil with an extreme lack of restraint.”

In the latter case–to which I’d confine the term “doubling”–what he writes two pages later (422) applies:  “In doubling, one part of the self ‘disavows’ another part.  What is repudiated is not reality itself–the individual  Nazi doctor was aware of  what  he was doing via the Auschwitz self–but the meaning of that reality.”  Later on the same page he goes on to  note that Auschwitz Nazi doctors “welcomed” doubling “as the only means of psychological function [short of  genuine resistance, that is--I'd add that crucial qualification].  If an environment is sufficiently extreme, and one chooses [note:  none of the victims had any choice] to remain in it, one may be able to do so only by means of doubling.”

On pp. 423-424 he writes: 

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one evokes the evil potential of the self.  That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it.  To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.  By means of doubling, Nazi doctors made a Faustian choice for evil:  in the process of doubling, in fact, lies an overall key to human evil.

I think he’s right about that.  And perhaps reflecting on how to avoid such evil should start with considering how, if what is at issue is guilt and responsibility for something occurring at the unconscious level, one can guard against the sort of motivated avoidance of knowing (or “willful ignorance” [to use the definition of stupidity John Hawkes gives in his novel Adventures in the Skin Trade in Alaska]) at issue in those [unconscious] processes:  How, that is, one can learn to recognize when one is (pre-)choosing to unleash and exploit just such unconscious processes.

Perhaps part of the answer to that question lies in the practice on a regular basis, until habituation occurs, of such things as the [AA] 10th step [of continuing to take "personal inventory" of oneself], or Ignatian examen of conscience, daily.

 

P. 458:  “The doctor’s [special, or especially frequent and intense] danger, we now see, lies in his capacity to double in a way that brings special power to his killing self even as he continues to anoint himself with medical purity.”  Thus, the Nazi doctor presents an emblematic instance of “a universal human proclivity toward constructing good motives [for oneself] while participating in evil behavior.”  And thus, too (p. 459):  “[E]ven as he killed,  every doctor’s Auschwitz self could retain some sense of mediating between man and nature and thereby saving life.”

Killing to Heal: Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi Doctors, #4

6/12/09

This is the fourth in my series of posts of philosophical journal entries I wrote last fall concerning Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors.  As was true for the journal entry in my immediately previous post, the first entry below begins with a remark about Alain Badiou, before shifting to Lifton.  The two entries below were written at the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, near Abiquiu, New Mexico, where I have been making personal retreats for years.

 

Thursday, October 28, 2008–at Christ in the Desert

During Vespers here yesterday, it struck me that the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ could  be taken in the sense I’ve been exploring a bit in recent entries on the “reality” of what is experienced–or, better, on “reality,” period.  That is, the resurrection could be taken to be the revelation to the apostles and then generations of the faithful that suffering, destitution, and pain are not “ultimate reality,” any more than, for Badiou [see my immediately preceding post], “the sad passions” such as “death and depression” are “loyal feelings,” or “licit passion” (so they are il-licit!).  The resurrection–which, for Badiou’s own account, is the sole truth [which Badiou, however, insists did not "really" happen] that makes of the human animal Saul, the subject Paul, with claim to universality–would then be the event of just that truth, at the very heart of the crucifixion itself, dispelling the later as “a dream one wakes from,” to borrow [again] from the Psalms.

 

Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, on Dr. Ernst B., the Auschwitz doctor who was able to help and rescue many, to become, in the words of one survivor, used as the title for this chapter in Lifton’s book, “a human being in an SS uniform”–p. 333: 

An important part of B.’s post-Auschwitz self and worldview is his unfinished business with Auschwitz.  His conflicting needs are both to continue to explore his Auschwitz experience and to avoid coming to grips with its moral significance.  His insistence that Auschwitz was not understandable serves the psychological function of rejecting any coherent explanation or narrative for the events in which he was involved.  He thus remains stuck in an odd post-traumatic pattern:  unable either to absorb (by finding narrative and meaning) or to free himself from Auschwitz images.

But isn’t that, indeed, how it is with all trauma, finally?  One cannot get past it!  One cannot “free” oneself from its “images” (and note how the ability of “finding narrative and meaning” for any trauma is just a way to “free”oneself from it–or, more accurately, to bury and avoid it).  (Lifton himself knows this, as his comments on p. 13, which I site in an [earlier] entry, shows, to give one good example.)  Isn’t that what [Eric] Santner [in his Psychotheology of Everyday Life], for example, distilled from his reading of Freud with Rosenzweig?  And doesn’t Santner’s analysis point to a “recovery” from trauma which respects it, so to speak, by neither explaining nor otherwise avoiding it, in its very inexplicibility and one’s own “stuckness” on it?

Related:  Lifton’s book came out before, a few years later, [Claude] Lantzman’s [film] Shoah, and Lantzman’s argument that any attempt to make Auschwitz “understandable” is a blasphemy, tantamount to compounding the brutality of the camps and the “Final Solution.”  That would complicate Lifton’s picture here,  and I’m curious what he thought of  Lantzman’s film and assertion.

There may be some advantage in distinguishing two different places from and in which one can get traumatically “stuck.”  One such place would be that of the perpetrators, to which in some sense Ernst B. continues to belong despite his attempts at (relative) “humanity” in his role there (as Lifton correctly insists).  From that place, as Lifton suggests in the quote I began with, there is a definite self-serving (by way of self-exculpating) dimension of “payoff” that comes from denying the explicability of Auschwitz.  But precisely for that reason, the specific nature of the stuckness at/from this locus is basically an exploitation of the very inexplicability at issue. 

In contrast, there is the place of the victim, where no such  exploitation occurs in the acknowledgement–here, genuine; when exploitative, disingenuous–of the inexplicability.  And it is here, in this place, if anywhere, that any “resurrection” must occur. (As, perhaps, it does in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel?  I’m not sure:  Need to look at that novel again, maybe.)

 

Wednesday, October 29, 2008–at Christ in the Desert

Yesterday, a propos Lifton, I forgot to note this thought that came to me when reading the passage I cited yesterday:

It is as if Auschwitz mirrors an event of truth, most especially in its “excessiveness,” its irreducibility to any explanation.  Because it (Auschwitz–and other [pseudo-?]events like it) mimics truth in that way, the illusion of it–specifically, it’s being “how things really are“–can only be dispelled by the event of a genuine truth, one that dismisses the illusion as a phantom.

There is also, perhaps, a sense in which such points of the mocking mimicry of a truth-event opens, despite its mimicking intentions, a site for the striking of truth.

Killing to Heal: Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi Doctors, #3

6/10/09

This is the third in my series of posts with journal entries I wrote last fall, on the dates indicated, concerning Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors.  Today’s entry begins with some reflections on a work by Alain Badiou, which I soon connect up with my continued reflections on Lifton’s study of “medicalized killing and the psychology of genocide,” the subtitle of his book.

 

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Badiou, Petit panthéon portratif [Little Portrait Galley] (Paris:  La Fabrique editions, 2008), “Ouverture,” pp. 7-8 [my translation]: 

If philosophy serves for something, it is to remove the chalice of sad passions [in the preceding sentence he has said that he holds "that death should not interest us, nor depression"], to teach us that pity is not a loyal feeling, nor complaint a reason to have reason, nor the victim that from which we should start to think.   On one hand, as the Platonic gesture establishes once and  for all, it is of truth, declined as necessary as beauty or the good, from which every licit passion originates and every creation of universal  aim.  On the other hand, as Rousseau knew, the human animal is essentially good, and when he is not, it is by some exterior cause that constrains him, a cause that must be detected, combatted, and destroyed as possible, without the least hesitation.

It seems to me that Badiou could be used here as a commentary on the following, from Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, p. 238, concerning the “prisoner doctors” at Auschwitz: 

As Henri Q. explained, “We suffered and [acted] within the limits of the possible. . . . Doctors did provide some comfort, I believe.  There was the comfort for the patient, the fact that he was not alone, that someone understood and was trying to help to do something for him–and that was already a lot. . . . We were a group, not just the [individual] doctors of our block.”  He could then conclude . . . that he and his friends “remained doctors . . . in spite of everything.”

Helping children could greatly contribute to the prisoner doctors’ struggle to maintain a healing identity.  Dr. Henri Q., for instance, told of the impact of a nine-year-old boy from a Jewish ghetto in Poland, who [was helped to survive the war and Auschwitz]. . . . He spoke  even more intensely of a still younger, Russian child (“a rare think in the camp”) whom he once took to the infirmary:  “I walked in front of all the blocks, and you could feel all the men, ten thousand men, who  were looking at this child.  I was very proud to walk with him. . . . as if I were walking with the president of the Republic.  There is only one president and there was only one child.”

Viewed through the lens of Badiou’s comment, such prisoner doctors at Auschwitz proved themselves to be philosophers.  And the philosophical reality was revealed to them–in and as their own form,  described by Dr. Henri Q., of “resistance.”  Philosophically, that reality was the presidency of that simple child.