The Image of Sovereignty #3: Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation (Concluded)

I have decided to confine today’s post to the following very brief completion of “Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation”–the opening section of the draft for a chapter in my planned book on trauma and philosophy, a chapter I am calling “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty.”  The entry below picks up the discussion where I left off in my preceding post, which readers may wish to consult for context.  At issue is the distinction I would draw between communities that pre-exist some trauma to which they claim to be responding, and communities that are literally formed through the sharing of trauma.

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It is just such communities—those constituted through and in the very sharing with one another of a trauma, rather than constituted in retrospect as already having been there all along and prior to the trauma—that are at issue in Rebecca Solnit’s idea, discussed in an earlier chapter, of what she calls “disaster communities,” communities of “mutual aid” that form spontaneously of themselves among those struck by the same traumatic event, such as an earthquake or a hurricane.  Communities constituted in that way, through the sharing of trauma with one another among those traumatized by some event, are not concerned with patrolling community borders for the sake of insuring community identity.  They do not demand any sort of credential attesting to group membership.  Rather, constituted by trauma itself, they are open to all the traumatized, without exception or qualification.  Such communities are accordingly open and inclusive.

In contrast, the sorts of communities that Kakar discusses are those in which the community constitutes itself as having already existed prior to the traumatic event, and as being, precisely as the community it takes itself to be, the target, in effect, of the traumatic event.  For example, insofar as the attacks of 9/11/2001 were cast as “attacks on America,” the latter–America as a community, or the community of all Americans–was construed as having already existed prior to the attacks and, indeed, as having been targeted for such attacks precisely as just that same pre-existing community, and because it was that community, that community and no other.

For ease of reference, I will call the first-mentioned sorts of community—those constituted only by and in the sharing of some trauma—communities of trauma or trauma-communities.  In contrast, I will call the sorts of communities Kakar discusses especially–those claiming an identity prior to, and one even targeted for, trauma—communities invested in trauma or trauma-invested communities.

Now, to apply that distinction to the concept of a nation or nation-state, it is clear that a nation or nation-state is a trauma-invested community.  The nation-state literally has a vested interest in trauma, an interest that the nation exploits for its own profit.  The nation traffics in trauma.

Nations profit from trauma in two intertwined ways.  One way uses trauma to justify aggressive courses of action on the part of already constituted nations.  The other uses it to justify the nation itself—that is, the claim to national sovereignty as such.  In the next section of this chapter I will address the first way in which nations profit from trauma, before turning to the second way in the section after next.

The Image of Sovereignty #2: Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation (continued)

This week I have time for only a brief post, one in which I continue the discussion, begun in last week’s post, of the work of Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.  That discussion, which I hope to finish next week, will constitute the opening section of the draft of a new chapter of my planned book on trauma and philosophy, the second of two chapters on “Trauma and Representation,” this one devoted to the topic of “The Image of Sovereignty.”

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In The Colors of Violence (pages 191-192) Kakar draws a useful distinction between “community” and “communalism.”  What is crucial to what Kakar calls communalism is the explicit assertion of belonging to some community.   Communalism is, in effect, a matter of yoking one’s own sense of personal identity with membership in a given community.  It is irreducible to simply belonging to a given community, being a member of it.  Instead, it is the elevation of such membership to the status of what defines one for oneself as the individual one is.  Communalism is literally self-identification—that is, the locating of one’s own personal identity or “selfhood”–in terms of belonging to a given community.   As Kakar nicely puts it, in communalism “[t]he ‘We-ness’ of the community is . . . replaced by the ‘We are‘ of communalism.”  As such, communalism is a sort of identity with a chip on its shoulder, always asserting itself and ever alert to the smallest perceived slight to the community to which one belongs, which gets taken as a personal insult.

Kakar himself uses a model developed by his colleague Oscar Peterson of the stages through which someone “identifying with his or her ethnic group” in such a way must go.  According to that model, the first stage of a “change from community to communalism” is to  “declare to all who share the crisis with me that I am one of them–a Hindu, a Muslim [or whatever].”  Thus, for Kakar, the explicit assertion of membership in such communities is itself preceded and grounded on an antecedently explicit awareness of that very membership.  That awareness of belonging to such a community is itself, by the model he is using, triggered by the occurrence of some traumatic event that is antecedently shared with other members of that same community.  In effect, the fact that the trauma is already shared with other members of the community to which one has belonged all along, but without express awareness of such membership or any felt need to assert it–that antecedent sharing of the trauma is what allows the explicit awareness of group membership to surface, which in turn grounds the experience of a need explicitly to assert that membership—and, of course, to defend the group itself against perceived threats originating from “outside” the group, in one sense or another of “outside.”   First comes membership in some group, then comes a trauma that galvanizes group members into becoming aware of their membership, then comes the assertion of solidarity with the group in the face of ongoing threat of one sort or another.

But what if the process actually occurs in a very different way, with a very different order of stages?  What if the very awareness of being a member of the community at issue—what if one’s very cultural or communal self-identification in terms of membership in the community–does not in fact precede the assertion thereof, as Kakar maintains, but results from it, by a certain, far from universal or “natural” process?  What if the whole idea of an antecedent awareness of a supposedly still earlier condition of belonging to the community is itself a retrospectively cast myth or fiction of the origin of the community, membership in which is being asserted?  What if the very constitution of the ethnic group itself as a distinct “we” is just another retrospective projection—in this case, the retrospective projection of group- identity as already having been there all along, when in fact it is first constituted only in a defensive response to trauma?

Kakar mentions the “individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group” (page 191, emphasis added).  But what if the very constituting of a threat as a “shared” one in the first place does not precede the trauma, but first comes about only through it, insofar as the trauma is communicated, in the very sense of being shared with others.  It is worth noting, in that connection, the German term for “communication.”  That term is Mitteilung, from mit, with, and teilen, to share or apportion, that is, to break into parts or portions–“shares”—and to give each of a group a part:  To share the shares, we could say.   That is the sense of “communication” at issue in, for example, the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, wherein bread is broken into parts and each “communicant” is given a piece.  In such cases, it is only the act of communication itself, the act of sharing, that first establishes something as shared.  What is more, the community of those who have shared the same thing is established by the very act of sharing, rather than preceding that act.  The sharing of what is shared gives rise to the community of the sharers, rather than that community already being there and then, as a community, having something happen to it, either collectively as something that happens to the community as such, or distributively as something that happens to each of the individual community members.

The Image of Sovereignty #1: Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation

Today’s post begins the draft of the next chapter of what I eventually plan to be a book on philosophy and trauma.  I am calling the chapter begun below “Trauma and Repesentation II:  The Image of Sovereignty.”  It is meant to form a pair with the preceding chapter, called “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image.”

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Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty

Modern political theory—whether in the form of the “social contract” theories in the tradition of classic liberalism from Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth, or in the form of reactions against liberalism, especially in such decisionistic theories as, emblematically, that of right-wing twentieth century legal theorist Carl Schmitt –consistently grounds sovereignty in trauma.  Like the great, ancient myths of cosmic creation, in both its social-contract and its decisionistic forms, modern political theory tells a story in accordance with which evil is older than good.  Evil is there at the very beginning.  Or, rather, it is there even before the beginning, at least if the beginning is taken to mean the point at which the story of modern sovereignty starts to be told.

In turn, the story of the emergence, expansion, and eventual crisis of sovereignty in the modern form, the very sovereignty for which both social contract and decisionistic theorists attempt to provide rational grounds, is inseparable from the story of the nation-state in its rise, development, and eventual decline, or at least apparent decline, in the face of the spread of global capitalism.  Trauma is no less there at the very beginning of the nation-state than it is at the beginning of modern sovereignty.  It is to the former, the inaugural, inaugurating relationship between trauma and the idea of the nation that I will turn first in this chapter.

Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation

In “Notes on the Memory Boom:  War, Remembrance and the Uses of the Past,” one of the essays in the collection Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006, pages 58-59), historian Jay Winter quotes Ernst Renan, from a series of lectures Renan gave in Paris in 1882, entitled “What is a nation?”  Renan answers his own question as follows:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.  Two things, which, in truth, are really one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle.  One is in the past, the other in the present.  One is the possessing in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is the present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the individual heritage one has received . . . To have the glory of the past in common, a shared will in the present; to have done great deeds together, and want to do more of them, are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people . . . One loves the house which one has built and passes on.

“Such ideas and images were commonplace in late nineteenth century Europe,” comments Winter on that passage from Renan.  “What was much newer,” he continues, “were powerful means to disseminate them.”  According to Winter, in the 19^th century “[w]riters on memory reached a much wider audience than ever before,”  precisely because “[t]he expansion of the print trade, the art market, the leisure industry, and the mass circulation press allied to developments first in photography and then in cinematography, created powerful conduits for the dissemination of texts, images and narratives of the past in every part of Europe and beyond.”

At any rate, at least when they relate to what Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas,” an idea which I will discuss in more detail shortly, the sorts of “collective” or “community” memories at issue in Renan’s original remarks and in Winter’s reflections on those remarks become falsifying memories in a special sense that sets them apart from the sort of “screen memories” discussed in the preceding chapter, and most especially from the sorts of memories that come under attack by the proponents of so called “false memory syndrome.”   Unlike screen memories or those at issue in the controversy around “false memory syndrome,” the sorts of “memories” Renan spoke about in 1882 are based on and involve the manipulation of memories of trauma and of the emotions those memories can trigger—a manipulation for some purpose formulated by the manipulator, however “collective” that manipulator may be, and irrespective of whether the manipulation is deliberate or not.

For ease of reference, I will call the sorts of memories—or at least the sorts of images that give themselves out as memories—with which Renan was concerned “national” memories, because of the role Renan and others attribute to them, the role of being midwives to the births of nations.  In contrast to such national memories, screen memories, properly so called, issue from trauma itself, as part of the mechanism of repression.  As I discussed in the preceding chapter, such memories “screen” in the double sense of  (1) hiding or covering- over, while at the same time (2) providing a surface, as it were, upon which trauma may project and thereby reveal itself.

Sometimes, paradoxically, and as was also touched upon in the preceding chapter, the very phenomenon of a sort of hyper-real image of a traumatic occurrence compulsively recurs to those who have been traumatized.  Such recurrence of such images is, in fact, a common sign of the “dissociation” so often reported as accompanying traumatic experiences.  Such hyper-real images, however, do not constitute a counter-example to screen memories.  Rather, as compulsively recurring yet in all their recurrence remaining inseparable from dissociation, they continue, precisely as hyper-real, to fulfill the double role of screen memories, by both masking and indicating, at one and the same time, the underlying trauma, serving the overall process of the  “repression” of the trauma at issue.  What gets effectively masked by the hyper-reality of the images is the very traumatic—the disturbing, emotion-ladened—character of the traumatic event they present themselves as imaging.  The very vividness of the images, their being so real and more than real, fosters the dissociation whereby one remains blinded and numbed in the face of what otherwise would be, or is at least feared to be, altogether overwhelming.

The key distinction that needs to be drawn here is that between repressing the trauma and manipulating it.  Therein lies the difference between screen memories, on the one side, and national memories on the other.  To be precise, the differentiation at issue need not involve two different sets of images.  Rather, one and the same image can come to serve both masters.  That is, one and the same image—let it be an image of two people holding hands and jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers on the morning of Septmeber 11, 2001, after the attacks took place—can serve as a screen memory when it vividly and compulsively recurs to someone who was traumatized by the attacks on the Towers; but it can also serve at the same time as something to be directly and even cynically manipulated, say by a politician with a vested interest in using it to justify pursuing a “war on terror.”

Trauma memories that are supposedly “false”, in the sense at issue in so called “false memory syndrome,” are more properly viewed as a form of “screen” memory in the double sense of simultaneously hiding a traumatic event yet providing a surface upon which what is so hidden can project and thereby reveal itself.  So, too, are the supposedly “accurate,” hyper-real memory images that recur, for example, in nightmares or “flashbacks” experienced by those who have been traumatized.

The sort of collective memory—or collective use of memory, if one is dealing with such an example of one and the same image functioning in two different yet interconnected ways, only one of which ways is that of “collective memory”–Renan describes, however, is not any such “screen.”  Rather, it is manufactured as a supposedly collective memory, through a process of production involving the manipulation of trauma and the images of it for external ends of the manipulator.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read to this point that I consider the use of the images of 9/11 for the sake of justifying the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to be examples of just such manufacturing and manipulation of supposedly collective images.  However, for my purposes here it does not matter whether I am right in that judgment or not.  All that matters is that the conceptual distinction between the two very different possible ways of deploying a memory image, or at least of what presents itself or is presented as a memory image, in relation to trauma be granted.  That is, all I ask here is that one understand the difference between a memory image (or even pseudo-memory image, if one likes) that functions both to conceal and to reveal, at one and the same time, a trauma undergone by the person to whom that image occurs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the manipulation, consciously or unconsciously, of an image of trauma and of the fear and insecurity engendered by it, to achieve goals of the manipulator external to the processes of traumatization itself.

The latter, the at least unconsciously manipulative use of images of trauma and the emotions those images trigger for the sake of creating, sustaining, and heightening collective identity, is central to what Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas” in The Colors of Violence:  Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1996), an insightful and influential analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in his native India.  Especially important for my purposes here is Kakar’s idea of how such “founding traumas” function in establishing religion-based cultural identities in conflict with other such identities based on the very same “founding trauma,” only vastly differently interpreted.  To give another example to add to his own Indian one, I would argue that it is easy to discern just such a shared “founding trauma” differently interpreted at work in the way “September 11, 2001,” functions in the conflictual genesis of both Arab “Jihadist” and American “anti-terrorist” extremist identities.  At any rate, what Kakar has to say about Hindu-Muslim violence in India clearly has relevance for the analysis of other cases elsewhere as well.

From my perspective–which considerably overlaps Kakar’s own, in my judgment—it is important to make explicit that the (no doubt largely “unconscious”) use of trauma to serve as the foundation for such religious/cultural identity formation as Kakar addresses is actually a matter of the manipulative avoidance of trauma, as opposed both to the dissociative repression of trauma and to the potentially healing overcoming of that repression in subsequent processing.  It is, in short, a coercive move to block trauma from traumatizing–and, therefore, a reactionary effort at forestalling the transformative and healing action that can occur only through letting such traumatization work itself through.

“Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart,” writes Kakar (page 150), “is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity.  Identity, both individual and collective, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny.”  Yet what if identity, either cultural or individual, is itself something that must, so to speak, be struck in the first place–in the same sense as one “strikes” (that is, mints) a coin–by the trauma at issue, such that the appearance of identity having already been there all along (but only “unconsciously,” as “lived”) becomes visible as a fiction:  a fiction founding identity, a founding fiction that itself forms identity in the first place?

Kakar himself, it seems to me, touches on something of the sort when, after making the remark cited above, he immediately continues as follows:  “Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s culture, including one’s language, ethnic origin, or religion.”  What is such indifference, if it is not indifference toward one’s “cultural identity”?  And if it is that, then it would be an indifference toward, precisely, an “identity” not one’s own, which is to say an identity that is, paradoxically, not one’s identity at all.  Then only in and as reaction to trauma would any “cultural identity,” any self-identification, any identifying of one’s self with one’s “culture,” form–get cast or created:  fictioned in the original sense of that term–at all.  Then “cultural identity”–or, for that matter, even “individual identity”–would be a reactive formation designed to ward off the “founding” trauma at issue.  And then, too, only the collapse of that reaction, that reactive formation or fiction, would at last let the trauma traumatize:  let the truth that flashes there “materialize.”

Responding to Trauma #5: Sudhir Kakar, Robert Antelme, and the Human Kind

Below is the continuation of what I hope will become a chapter in a book.

The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

Eisenstein’s analysis in Traumatic Encounters can be profitably combined with that of Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar in his book The Colors of Violence (University of Chicago Press, 1996), where Kakar draws a valuable distinction between “community” and “communalism,” to use his terms.  Here is one way he formulates that distinction (pages 191-192):  “Communalism as a state of mind . . . is the individual’s assertion of being part of a religious community, preceded by a full awareness of belonging to such a community.  The ‘We-ness’ of the community is here replaced by the ‘We are‘ of communalism.”  Thus, what Kakar calls “community” is a state of being, whereas the explicit assertion of that state of being–that is, of membership in the community at issue–becomes the focal interest of the state of mind he calls “communalism.”

It is helpful to remember, here, that, all other things being equal, the felt need to assert that one is or has some given thing varies inversely with the felt assurance of being or having that same thing:  The more secure I feel about myself or whatever I have come to identify with myself–whether that be my looks, my intelligence, or my community membership—the less do I feel myself driven to assert myself or my having the identity at issue.

But what if the very “awareness” of being a member of a community–one’s “cultural/communal identity”–does not, as Kakar says in the lines just quoted, “precede” the “assertion” thereof, except and unless it is a retrospectively cast myth or fiction of the origin of the community, membership in which is being “asserted”?  Just before the lines already quoted, Kakar borrows his psychoanalytic colleague Oscar Peterson’s account of the stages through which one must go as ”an individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group.”  But isn’t the very constitution of the ethnic group itself as a definite “we” another retrospective projection, to use an accurate if paradoxical expression, of itself as already having been there all along?  And isn’t the very constituting of a threat as a “shared” one a part of that very process–i.e., isn’t the “sharing” itself something that must be communicated in Heidegger’s sense in Being and Time–whereby “Mitteilung,” the German for “communication,” is taken seriously in its etymological meaning of sharing-with –in order to come into being at all?

Following Peterson, Kakar says the first stage of “the change from community to communalism” is that “I declare to all who share the crisis [whatever it may be, that has set off the whole process] with me that I am one of them–a Hindu, a Muslim [or whatever].”  With regard to that, it is striking to compare the post-9/11 Le Monde headline  “We are all Americans now,” and then go on to compare both (Le Monde’s ”all Americans,” on one hand, and Kakar’s example of all being Hindus or Muslims or the like, on the other) with Eisenstein’s notion of all Germans of conscience identifying themselves as Jews after Kristallnacht.

Those three cases of self-identification with, or constitution of, a self-defining group are significantly different from one another, in ways that deserve to be noted.  For example, there is something offensive to many about the Le Monde identification, especially insofar as it is an identification with the very community (“America”) that itself marginalizes so many members of so many other communities, and silences, refuses to hear, and refuses even to let be heard, the voice of the marginalized that sounds in the 9/11 attacks themselves.  In contrast, insofar as globalized capitalism marginalizes both Hindus and Muslims in the “global market,” constitution of, and identification with, either of those two communities, “Hindu” or “Muslim,” has a liberatory potential completely lacking in the constitution of, and identification with, a global “American” community, as in Le Monde’s post-9/11 headline, which is not at all liberatory.

In contrast to both “we are all Americans” after 9/11, or “we are all Hindus” after some attack or other crisis for the Hindu community, Paul Eisenstein’s suggested “we are all Jews” in Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht is wholly liberatory, and escapes the very oppression of any “communalism” at all in favor of a constituting and identifying with a genuine, genuinely open community.  Similarly and importantly, taken in its concrete historical setting, Duras’s willingness to affirm community even with the Nazis—her willingness literally to own up to their crimes:  to take those crimes on as belonging to “us” all, that is as being “our own” crimes—is a movement of universal opening and inclusion, and is as such wholly liberatory and void of what Kakar calls communalism.  Far from being a movement of assertion of identity via membership in some special group, Duras’s affirmation that we are all Nazis is a turning aside from all such exclusion and exclusivity, such sticking to “one’s own.”

Duras’s movement of universalization, made while she was still awaiting her husband Robert Antelme’s return from the camps, or at least some clear news of him, one way or another, was, as it turned out, unknowingly but simultaneously reciprocated by Antelme himself, as he was later to recount in his own memoir, The Human Race, first written in 1946-47, but not published in France until ten years later, and eventually translated into English by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston, Illinois:  The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992).  The reference at issue comes near the end of the book, finally explaining the title thereof.  Antelme begins by writing (page 219) that “there are not several human races, there is only one human race.  It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally stand powerless before us.”  On the next page he elaborates:

[I]f, facing nature, or facing death, we can perceive no substantial difference between the SS and ourselves, then we have to say that there is only one human race.  And we have to say that everything in the world that masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is false and mad; and that we have proof of this here, the most irrefutable proof, since the worst of victims cannot do otherwise than establish that, in its worst exercise, the executioner’s power cannot be other than one of the powers that men have, the power to murder.  He can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else.

Those lines are the culmination of his whole account of his experience in the camps in the preceding pages.  Thus, much earlier (page 51) he writes:  ”For the most despised proletarians there is the reassurance of reason.  He is less alone that the person who despises him, whose position will become narrower and narrower, and who will inevitably become more and more isolated and steadily weaker.  The insults of these people are no more able to reach us than they are able to get their hands on the nightmare we have become in their brains:  for all their denying of us we are still there.”

Thus, Anthelme also joins the Psalmist, to return to that ancient source once again, in declaring the impermanence and ireality of those who would exclude others to their own profit–of whatever sort, material or other–and affirming, in contrast, the abiding reality of just what the excluders would exclude.   Here, Anthelme gives that idea radical form, affirming the irreality of the very Nazi camps themselves, and the reality of the life those camps would deny and annihilate.

Anthelme returns to this theme a bit later (page 74), adding more detail.  He begins with a reflection on the spectator to the calamity of the camps:

Th[e] passer-by who happens down the road and goes strolling past the barbed wire, a small dark silhouette against the snow—he is one of the world’s forces.  But if he sees us [that is, the camp inmates] behind the fence, if somehow the idea just enters his head that there are other possibilities in nature than being a man who walks freely along a road, if he launches out on some such train of thought, then it is very likely he will soon feel threatened by all those shaved heads, by all those figures not one of whom he has the slightest chance ever of getting to know, and who are for him of all things on earth the most unknown.  And these men themselves will perhaps contaminate for him the trees that in the distance surround the fence, and this passer-by upon the road will then risk feeling himself smothering within the whole of nature, as though closed shut upon him.

The reign of man, of man who acts or invests things with meaning, does not cease.  The SS cannot alter our species.  They are themselves enclosed within the same humankind and the same history.  Thou shalt not be:  upon that ludicrous wish an enormous machine has been built. . . . [Yet:] They must take account of us so long as we are alive, and it still depends upon us, upon our tenacious hold upon being, whether at the moment they come to kill us they are made to feel utterly certain they have been cheated.

Thus, like William Faulkner’s “mixed-race” character Joe Christmas at the end of Light in August, whose lucid eyes displaying continuing consciousness escape and banish the attempt, by those who have just castrated him and left him bleeding to death, to erase the insufferable yet insuperable fact of his very existence, the victims in the Nazi camps escape their captors’ attempt to make it that they shall not have been.

Equally, however, the perpetrators and their crime cannot be made not to have been.  Thus, Antelme continues:  ”But we cannot have it that the SS does not exist or has not existed.  They shall have burned children, and they shall have done it willingly.  We cannot have it that they did not wish to do it.  They are a force, just as the man walking down the road is one.  And as we are, too; for even now they cannot stop us from exerting our power.”

An episode he then tells of an SS guard from the Rhineland effectively attests that power.  One day, approaching Antelme and another inmate in the factory basement where the two prisoners are sorting machine parts, the Rhinelander holds out his hand to them.  They shake his hand.  Doing so, Antelme writes (page 75), “We had become accomplices.”  By that he does not mean that he and the other prisoner have become accomplices of the SS in their crimes, however.  Rather, as the whole passage makes clear, in offering his hand to shake the guard from the Rhineland has become an accomplice in the act of overturning the SS order:

We had become accomplices.  But he hadn’t so much come to encourage us as to seek reassurance himself, to obtain a confirmation.  He came to share in our power.  Against that handshake there was nothing that could prevail, neither the barking of thousands of SS troops nor the whole apparatus of ovens, dogs, and barbed wire, nor famine, nor lice. . . . Nor did this covert and solitary gesture have a merely private character. . . . Any human relationship a German were to enter into with one of us was the sign itself of a deliberate rebellion against the whole SS order.  Once could not do what the Rhinelander had done—could not, that is, behave as a man toward one of us—without thereby classifying oneself historically. . . . as if they [that is, such human relationships as even a simple handshake] were themselves the paths, narrow and obscure, that history had there been forced to follow.

This example merits a moment’s further reflection.  For one thing, it contrasts with the self-serving—by self-exculpating—acts of the Nazi Auschwitz doctors who, as Robert J. Lifton discusses in The Nazi Doctors, could continue to think of themselves as “saving” lives in the very midst of taking so many.  As Antelme presents it, the Rhinelander’s gesture is a sort of sacramentally effective sign of humanity shared by the guard and the prisoners.  As such a gesture, one that sacramentally effects the very solidarity it signifies, it is indeed, as Antelme has it, an act of genuine rebellion:  an affirmation-demonstration of the very reality the camps sought to deny.  It’s value, however, lies solely in serving such a sacramentally effective lesson; it has no value at all for exculpating the guards, including especially the Rhinelander himself, insofar as he continues, by his very continuing SS membership if nothing else, to be an accomplice, as well, of the Nazis and their entire system.

Just such rebellion is already manifest in the assertion already cited, “We’re still here!” made by the mere presence the victim, like Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s novel.  It is also still–and strongly—there even in the inmate dying or, what is more, already among the dead.  Thus, Antelme writes (pages 93-94):

There are moments when you could kill yourself just in order that the SS fetch up against this limit as it confronts the impassive object you’d have become, the dead body that has turned its back on them, that goesn’t give a shit about their law.  The dead man will at once be stronger than they are just as trees and clouds and cows, which we call things and incessantly envy.  The SS undertaking is careful not to go to the point of denying the daisies growing in the fields.  And like the dead man, the daisy doesn’t give a shit about their law.  The dead man no longer offers them a handle.  Let them savage his face, let them hack his body to bits, the dead man’s very impassiveness, his complete inertness will counter all the blows they strike at him.

That is why we are not always absolutely afraid of dying.  There are moments when, in a flash, death stands there as a simple way for getting away from here, for turning our back, for not caring anymore.

Here, death functions as does the retreat into fantasy whereby the prisoner being tortured by the representatives of the only apparently all-powerful and ubiquitous State at the end of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.  Thus does the victim escape even the executioner, whether by fantasizing or by dying—and displaying thereby the enduring irreality of “all that,” of all the trappings with which the powerful seek to hide their own vacuity.

***

Are We All Americans? Kakar’s Distinction between “Community” and “Communalism”

1/26/09

In the journal entry below, I continue my reflections on Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Following up form yesterday:

Kakar uses a good distinction between “community” and “communalism.”  To use his formulation on pp. 191-192:  “Communalism as a state of mind, then, is the individual’s assertion of being part of a religious community, preceded by a full awareness of belonging to such a community.  The ‘We-ness’ of the community is here replaced by the ‘We are‘ of communalism.”

But–again–what if the very “awareness” of being a member of a community–one’s “cultural/communal identity”–does not, as he says, “precede” the “assertion” thereof, except and unless it is a retrospectively cast myth/fiction of the origin of the community, membership in which is being “asserted”?

P. 191, before the sentences already quoted, Kakar borrows Oscar Peterson’s suggested stages of ”an individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group.”  But is the very constitution of the ethnic  group itself as a definite “we” another, retrospective projection of itself as already having been there all along?  And isn’t the very constituting of a threat as a “shared” one a part of that very process–i. e., isn’t the “sharing” itself something that must be communicated in Heidegger’s sense in Being and Time [whereby "communication"--"Mitteilung," in German--is taken seriously in its etymological meaning of sharing with], in order to come into being at all? 

Following Peterson, Kakar says the first stage of “the change from community to communalism” is:  “First, I declare to all who share the crisis with me that I am one of them–a Hindu, a Muslim [or whatever].”  With regard to that, it is striking to think of the headline in Le Monde the morning after the 9/11 attacks:  “We are all Americans now.”  Then go on to compare both (“all Americans” [on one hand] and “all Hindus,” or the like [on the other]) with Eisenstein’s notion of all Germans of conscience identifying themselves as Jews [when Nazi persecution of Jews first began]–how different history would ahve been had that happened after Kristallnacht in 1938, for example!  Those three cases of self-identification with/constitution of a self-defining group are significantly different from one another, in ways that deserve to be studied.  For example, there is something offensive [to me] about the Le Monde identification, especially insofar as it is an identification with the very “community” that marginalizes all member of “other” communities, and silences/refuses to let be heard/to hear the voice of the marginalized that sounds in the 9/11 attacks.  In contrast, insofar as globalized capitalism marginalizes both Hindus and Muslims in the “global market,” constitution of, and identification with, either of those two communities, “Hindu” or “Muslim,” has a liberatory potential completely lacking in the constitution of, and identification with, a global “American” community, as in Le Monde.  That last is not at all liberatory.  In contrast to both, “we are all Jews” in Nazi Germany is wholly liberatory, and escapes the very oppression of any “communalism” at all in favor of a constituting and identifying with a genuine, genuinely open community.  (And I’d be willing to venture the guess that only “open” communities [such as, in that context of Germany in 1938, would have been constituted and identified by "We are all Jews"] are “genuine” communities, as opposed to communalisms, so to speak, at all.)

Trauma and Identity (“Cultural” and “Individual”): Reflections on Sudhir Kakar’s Work

1/23/09

Both the journal entry below and the one I will post next concern psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence, his important and influential analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in his native India.  Especially important for me is his idea of how “founding traumas” function in establishing religion-based cultural identities in conflict with other such identities based on the very same “founding trauma,” only vastly differently interpreted.  It is easy to discern just such a shared “founding trauma” differently interpreted at work in the way “September 11, 2001,” functions in the conflictual genesis of both Arab “Jihadist” and American “anti-terrorist” extremist identities.  

From my perspective, which considerably overlaps Kakar’s own, in my judgment, and which finds its first articulation in the pages of my journal in the entry below, the (no doubt largely “unconscious”) use of trauma to serve as the foundation for such religious/cultural identity formation is actually a matter of the manipulative avoidance of trauma, as opposed both to the dissociative repression and the healing processing of trauma .  It is, as I first try to formulate it below, a coercive move to block trauma from traumatizing–and, therefore, a reactionary effort at forestalling the transformative and healing action that can occur only through letting such traumatization work itself through.  Other entries I  will eventually post on this site in the coming weeks will explore that idea much more fully.    

Here is the first of two entries, then, on Kakar’s The Colors of Violence:

 

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence:  Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 150:  “Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart, is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity.  Identity, both individual and collective, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny.”

Yet what if identity itself is one struck in the first place–as one “strikes” (= mints) a coin–by the trauma at issue, such that the appearance  of identity having already been there all along (but only “unconsciously,” as “lived”) becomes a fiction founding (= a founding fiction [of]) identity formation?  Doesn’t Kakar himself touch on something of the sort when he immediately  continues as follows:  “Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with  regard to  one’s culture, including  one’s language, ethnic origin, or  religion”?  What is that, if not indifference toward one’s “cultural identity”?  So it would be an indifference toward, precisely, and “identity” not one’s own, which is to say [an identity that] is not one’s identity at all.  Or:  Only in reaction/as reaction to trauma does any “cultural identity,” any self-identification (= identifying of one’s self) with one’s “culture,” form/get cast or created or fictioned at all.  then “cultural identity”–or, for that matter, even “individual identity”–would be a reactive formation designed to ward off the trauma at issue.  And then, too, only the collapse of that reaction/reactive formation would at last let the trauma traumatize:  let the truth that flashes there “materialize” (Badiou’s corps).