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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

To be continued in my next post.

6/5/09

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

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

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

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

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

What is the truth of Auschwitz?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thursday, October 23, 2008

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

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

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

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

Jean Améry. Foto: Lutz Möhring

Me lo suelo imaginar paseando por una playa solitaria, no sé por qué. Camina despacio y, de vez en cuando, se detiene. Contempla el mar, se agacha para coger conchas o piedrecitas, se mete las manos en los bolsillos… Nada extraordinario. Otras veces se sienta en la arena y se queda un buen rato así, sin hacer nada. Luego se levanta, echa de nuevo andar y, poco a poco, se va alejando hasta que lo pierdo de vista entre la bruma. Ignoro por completo a dónde se dirige, si es que se dirige a algún sitio.

Verdaderamente, no tengo ninguna razón de peso para afirmar esto, pero juraría que, dentro de lo que cabe, se encuentra, al fin, en una cierta y algo incómoda paz consigo mismo.

————————————

El escritor y filósofo Jean Améry, de nombre real Hans Mayer (Améry proviene de combinar las letras de Mayer para dar como resultado un apellido francés, en lugar de alemán), nació en Viena en 1912 y murió en 1978 en Salzburgo, tras ingerir una sobredosis de somníferos.

Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial formó parte de la resistencia en Bélgica y fue capturado por la Gestapo, que le interrogó y torturó salvajemente. Una vez descubierta su ascendencia judía, Améry fue enviado al campo de exterminio de Auschwitz y, después, a los campos de Buchenwald y Bergen-Belsen, donde finalmente fue liberado por el ejército británico, en 1945.

La experiencia del horror nazi marcó su vida y su brillante, profunda y amarga obra literaria. Aparte de multiples artículos y ensayos, entre sus escritos destacan los libros Más allá de la culpa y la expiación. Tentativas de superación de una víctima de la violencia (sobre el horror del Holocausto), Revuelta y resignación o Levantar la mano sobre uno mismo. Disurso sobre la muerte voluntaria, este último, publicado dos años antes de que se quitase la vida.

Instalado voluntaria o inevitablemente en el resentimiento, Améry rechazó siempre cualquier tipo de perdón hacia sus verdugos o de intento de comprensión sobre las circunstancias en las que llevaron a cabo sus crímenes. Su vida fue un desesperado intento por encontrar una nueva identidad lejos de la impuesta por su condición de víctima y superviviente, y en la que poder “renacer”: “Sólo perdona realmente quien consiente que su individualidad se disuelva en la sociedad […]. Todo perdón y olvido forzados mediante presión social son inmorales […]. Se me ha infligido una herida. Necesito desinfectarla y vendarla, no reflexionar sobre por qué el verdugo me asestó el golpe, y de esa guisa, al comprender sus motivos, acabar medio disculpándolo”, escribió.

Primo Levi dijo de él: “Hans Mayer, alias Jean Améry… Entre estos dos nombres se desarrolla su vida sin paz y sin búsqueda de paz”.

[UPDATE: Greens Engage have uploaded a pdf of the reader here.]

A while back, I posted a link to the anti-German reader Your Revolution is No Liberation. Unfortunately it has gone off-line, so I have tried to use the table of contents to provide links to some of the articles. Here’s the ones I couldn’t find.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is now available at Google Books, although there are ethical and functionality issues with that. There is a summary at Cambridge University Press and the Frankfurt School blog, and selected chapters at Libcom, Stanford University Press and MIA. However, these barely touch on the crucial last chapter, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightment”. That is, though, summarised in these study notes (scroll down).

Stephan Gregat’s “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism within the Left” is not, as far as I know, available in English on the web. His full publication list, with some links to texts (in German) is here. If you read German, there’s links to lots of his stuff at Ak Toscanini. I’ve linked at another time to his interview in English.

Jean Améry’s “The Respectable Anti-Semitism” is a translation of  “Der ehrbare Antisemitismus“, Die Zeit, 25 July 1969.

“The classic phenomenon of anti-Semitism is taking a new shape. The old one still exists, this I call coexistence….To be clear: anti-Semitism, included in…anti-Zionism as the thunderstorm is part of the cloud, is again respectable.”(1)

“Anti-Semitism was once the socialism of the stupid guys. Today it is about to become an integrating ingredient of socialism as such, and thereby every socialist turns himself, by his free will, into a stupid guy. Anti-Semitism has become respectable again, but there is no such thing as respectable anti-Semitism!”(2)

Amery was a resistance fighter, camp survivor and, later, writer, comparable to the better known Primo Levi.  German version on-line in several places, including Comlink, AL, nadir, kosmopolitburo. [Sources: (1) "Der ehrbare Antisemitismus", quoted in Susanne Urban's "Anti-Semitism In Germany Today: Its Roots And Tendencies". (2) quoted by Arno Lustiger, JP.]

5/4/09

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

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

Monday, September 22, 2008

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

Pp. 25-26:

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

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

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

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

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

May 1, 2009

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

Saturday, September 20, 2008

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

PP. 76-77: 

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

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

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

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

4/29/09

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

Friday, September 19, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to continue to think about all this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/27/09

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

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

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

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

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 14: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

crolla all’inverso la ferrovia nella simulazione della fretta, sta ferma la casa di riposo gialla come una malattia di fegato con le finestre senza tende. In “casa di riposo”, dunque dovrebbero riposare, riposano eccome nel minimo comune denominatore delle rughe, è lo stesso verbo della funzione al cimitero. Tutta la casa senza riposo trema impaziente al respiro di onda anomala che li percuote dalla pianta dei piedi nudi alle placche dorate nel cervello, qualche volta le loro gambe hanno uno spasmo come se potessero ancora scattare nell’urto di un centometrista ubriaco, un treno si ferma con il suo carico di deportati di lusso, alla finestra una vecchia faccia illuminata dal retro si indovina la nuca fragilissima si indovinano le ossa calcificate a destino, si vede bene l’aureola dissacrante dei capelli non acconciati gli occhi come spilloni che mi trafiggono, magia nera di capelli bianchi, sono quell’ affare di pezza creato dal giullare di Haiti, trasportato per mare in una cassa di articoli da poco, rallentare il passo, alzare il mento a ingoiare celeste oscuro dal cielo delle otto, farsi trapassare a braccia larghe incontrare quel viso scegliere di rallentare il passo subire il contraccolpo. Sempre bisogna obbedire, a tutte, e poi principalmente a quelle ispirazioni decisive

essere come una macchina da decapitazione decorata di fiori francesi lasciarsi squartare in due metà imperfette tenute insieme da uno stelo breve e tenace piazzare cuore e intestino sotto le fontane lasciarsi rimescolare il sangue essere una bestia ma è una legge durissima bisogna esserlo sul serio dal momento che si è scelto fare a meno di rassicurazioni, domare come un organo in più che causa strani pallori strani cedimenti il desiderio inspiegabile di una specie di fabbro vulcanico che faccia colare lava sulla faccia sbiadita del mondo, non c’entra con la vecchia, vertigine di essere al mondo, fare ciao con la mano. Lentissimamente il viso alza la sua, mano, e incredibile, risponde.

Su voi longevi quanto i condilomi e le ricadute influenzali, che riproducete voi stessi in minuetto, che vi mordete i polsi nell’antibagno della vostra pigra anima pomeridiana da cocktail, io non posso lanciare che petardi da bambini invece di bombe a mano: ugualmente senza soprassalto vi brucereste le sopracciglia al fuoco della vostra certezza, mentre pezzo a pezzo vi fondete allo spiedo all’ora del vicinato ostile. Le ustioni, no, che non le meritate: quelle, a noi soltanto, una sulla gola da nascondere con un colletto amletico, una sull’inguine perché ci si ricordi che si brucia

Su voi che mi date prurito, mal di stomaco, conoscenza delle armi, rifiuto degli atlanti, riscoprire la compassione perché soffro della vostra inappetenza della vostra tendenza a diventare mausoleo e scavo archeologico mentre ancora contenete una quantità di sangue insperata sei litri di possibilità bisogna camminarvi sopra come su una scala mobile a condizionatori spalancati e boutique negli angoli, tu non riesci a concentrarti solo perché non ci si può fermare su questo immenso tappeto di carne malandata che voi riuscite ad essere semplicemente rifiutando voi stessi ogni minuto anch’io ho paura che cazzo credete ma avete urgentemente bisogno di un clistere mastodontico avete forse bisogno di piantarla di sottrarvi all’impatto voi che non voglio colpire negli stinchi, perché non distinguo più la geometria dei vostri corpi se ce n’è mai stata una, che con la sola debole forza numerica riempite la strada di vegetazione che c’è da farsi largo a colpi di machete, nelle vostre sabbie mobili io scelgo di affondare fino a metà coscia e poi scatto in avanti se riesco. Perché, perchè davvero nell’intrico che sembra complicato c’è un animale semplice e balordo, che dorme con un occhio aperto e il culo a nudo e le mascelle piallate a calci: a quello io tendo, i suoi polpacci stridenti e i suoi occhi che si velano per non mostrarsi più dolci di quanto già non sono le sue imperfezioni cantano come un branco di lupi in estasi si muove così piano che non riesco a capire perché non lo raggiungo facilmente è grande ma per accarezzarlo bisogna prenderlo alla gola e stenderlo con il karate della morte con l’ultima istanza con l’avidità del condannato senza appello è sufficiente ma costa veramente, ci vorranno molti giorni per recuperare, soffrirete moltissimo prima, durante e dopo, come è naturale, ma i vostri conti da bottegaia appendeteli in cortile, non c’è altro.

Una sulla tua ferita perché non voglio curarla. Un’ ustione.

Io tendo all’animale che fa un balzo in avanti sempre uno più di me e tendiamo a quella bestia che rifiuta di morire compassata al buio dei vostri salmi nelle vostre miti cerimonie, alla compagnia dolorosa delle vostre solitudini preferiamo la solitudine dolorosa delle nostre, MEGLIO, ma in guardia,  se riusciamo a liberarlo contro il cielo del pomeriggio, se fosse sguinzagliato a bave e guaiti imperiale come un cazzo in tiro tiepido come l’ultimo batterio di sole che colpisce a fondo contro i muri, da venirci voglia di strisciare ai lati invece di battere la via prevista se potessimo afferrarlo per il tempo di fargli assaggiare i vostri guanti di lattice di cui riderebbe come un selvaggio di fronte alla diplomazia se potessimo condurlo come un cane rabbioso tra le vostre stagioni della semina dettate dal calendario del successo a cottimo se potessimo indovinarlo con un’autopsia leggera marchiato a fuoco acciambellato intestinale dentro la vostra nudità rivestita come sapete fare voi come fate ad essere vestiti perfino da nudi se potessimo nasconderci dietro i suoi denti nelle sue mandibole sotto le sue unghie e osservare da vicino quanto vi strazia come vi strazia

Una sulla tua risata intagliata ad artigli di bestia nelle guance perché racconti come è andata. Era un motel incendiato bisogna scappare dalla finestra lasciare tutto com’era e come non sarà certamente come nella sola morale che conosciamo che è un colpo secco mentre quelli giocano a roulette russa al piano di sotto. Solo una strinatura. La pelliccia al caldo. Difendo il tuo animale morente perché possa morire di sola estasi e ad ogni morte invocarne un’altra più forte

e se fosse costretto a suonare le vostre viole i vostri strumenti accordati cosa vi aspettate, distruggerebbe il legno a morsi per il solo gusto di far musica con gli umori e le sconcezze del linguaggio se fosse messo a regime sui vostri soffitti ecco che crollerebbe, pesante e oscuro, sollievo pesante e oscuro sui vostri giorni troppo poco solenni, come un lampadario regale, prendono fuoco i capelli dei suonatori a pagamento fuggono le piattole si destano i domestici ubriachi dal pavimento delle cucine, più morenti, morenti animali, vogliamo essere solo l’animale indifeso non il vostro essere umano sulla difensiva vogliamo perdere in anticipo perché giochiamo con carte giocattolo non ho più anticorpi, la scienza su questo non parla chiaro, sono felice solo a nuca bloccata se la sua mano è abbastanza determinata e ha un buon odore, ma è già perduto. vi temo sì, vi temo immensamente perchè le vostre orecchie non circoncise dormono sotto i cappelli da freddo polare vi temo perché fate il freddo polare dove c’era soltanto sete e arsura eppure temendovi vi scruto per comprendere in quale gabbia lo avete sistemato in quale sauna lo esibite a biglietto ridotto per aprire quella scatola di dolci da poco in cui lo avete esiliato mentre eravamo colpevolmente distratti mentre eravamo incolpevolmente addormentati mentre la nostra carne crepitava come un fuoco di puttane al freddo mentre ingoiavamo quell’ attimo di luce nel cielo istoriato di lanci pollockiani a getto continuo mentre esercitavamo involontariamente la tenerezza delle bestie e lasciarlo balzare fuori, anche se dovesse divorare noi per primi.

]]> http://secondlitart.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/die-juden-israel-und-wir/ Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:16:17 +0000 regulaerni http://secondlitart.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/die-juden-israel-und-wir/

Bereits 1969 veröffentlichte Jean Amery: “Der ehrbare Antisemitismus”. Schon damals beschrieb er den aus dem Anti-Israelismus sich generierende Antisemitismus in der politischen Linken.

Einst war das der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle. Heute steht er im Begriff, ein integrierender Bestandteil des Sozialismus schlechthin zu werden, und so macht jeder Sozialist sich selber freien Willens zum dummen Kerl. (…) Jahrelang hat man – um einmal von Deutschland zu reden – den israelischen Wehrbauern gefeiert und die feschen Mädchen in Uniform. In schlechter Währung wurden gewisse Schuldgefühle abgetragen. Das musste langweilig werden. Ein Glück, dass für einmal der Jude nicht verbrannt wurde, sondern als herrischer Sieger dastand, als Besatzer. Napalm und so weiter. Ein Aufatmen ging durchs Land. Jedermann konnte reden wie die “Deutsche National- und Soldaten-Zeitung”; wer links stand, war befähigt, noch den Jargon des Engagements routinemäßig zu exekutieren.”

Malte Lehming hat einen Artikel zum Antisemitismus der Sozialisten geschrieben und ist der Meinung, dass Bob Dylan mit dem Lied “Neighborhood Bully” im Jahre 1982 den Nagel auf den Kopf getroffen hat.

“Ja, der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft, er ist nur einer / Seine Feinde sagen, er ist auf ihrem Land. / Sie sind Millionen, er einer / kein Ort nimmt ihn, nirgends kann er hin. Er ist der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft.

Der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft versucht zu überleben, / dass er lebt, wirft man ihm vor. / Wehren soll er sich nicht, / eine dicke Haut soll er haben, / auf den Boden soll er sich legen und sterben, wenn sie ihm die Tür eintreten. Er ist der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft.

Der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft wurde aus jedem Land vertrieben, / als Exilant wandert er von Ort zu Ort. Vor seinen Augen wurde die Familie verstreut, seine Landsleute verfolgt und zerstört, / und immer wird ihm vorgehalten, dass er überhaupt geboren ist. Er ist der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft.

Und als er eine Mörderbande k. o. schlug, kamen die Kritiker, / alte Frauen verdammten ihn, er solle sich entschuldigen. / Dann vernichtete er eine Bombenfabrik, es freute sich niemand. / Die Bomben galten ihm. / Und er sollte sich schämen. / Er ist der Störenfried der Nachbarschaft.”

Quelle: Tipp E.S.

Offer som inte vill glömma, inte heller vare sig ”försonas” eller ”förlåta”, är besvärliga. De tillåter inte saker och ting ”att gå vidare”, de vill inte lägga ”det gamla åt sidan”; dom vägrar, dom konstrar, dom stretar emot; dom tror inte ”att tiden läker alla sår”.  Dom vägrar delaktighet i den sövande glömskan, vägrar se någon samhörighet mellan offer och förövare.
En sådan är Jean Améry (denna blogg, avsnittet “Strappado” ). Han hyser, skriver han, en ”måttlig vilja till försonlighet” och säger sig vara övertygad om ”att när nazioffer högljutt uppger sig vara beredda till försoning, kan detta bara vara ett uttryck för avtrubbning och likgiltighet inför livet eller en masochistisk förvandling av ett bortträngt äkta hämndbegär.”

Han fortsätter: ”Det är endast den som låter sin  individualitet helt och hållet gå upp i samhället och endast kan se sig själv som en social funktion, alltså den avtrubbade och likgiltige, som faktiskt ger förlåtelse. Han låter det skedda vara vad det var. Han låter, som man säger, tiden läka alla sår. Hans tidsuppfattning är inte förryckt, det vill säga inte uppryckt från det biologiskt sociala området och överfört till det moraliska. Som en avindividualiserad, utbytbar del i samhällsmekanismen lever han i samförstånd med och förhåller sig till denna …” (från den förträffliga tidskriften Glänta, 2006:4, s. 47)

”den som låter sin  individualitet helt och hållet gå upp i samhället och endast kan se sig själv som en social funktion”. Den som suddar ut sig själv, den som vägrar erkänna sig själv som just ”sig själv” för att det skulle tvinga fram val och ansvar, som istället låter sig uppslukas av ”samhällsmekanismen”; den personen är farlig. Fast jag har aldrig funderat över att beskriva offret så, för mig har det med förövarens psykologi att skaffa, det där med att vara ”en god, nitisk tjänsteman”, att ”bara lyda order”.

Améry skriver även: ”Jag tyngs av den kollektiva skulden, säger jag; inte de. Den värld som förlåter och glömmer har dömt mig och inte dem som mördade eller lät morden ske. ( …) Mördarnas och gaskammarkonsruktörernas generation – de som alltid var beredda att underteckna vad som helst, fältherrarna som aldrig försummade sina plikter mot Hitler – åldras med värdighet.” (ibid, s. 49f)

Offren blir problemet. De sätter käppar i hjulet. Om de inte glömmer, om de vägrar vara rationella och samarbetsvilliga; de som blir överkörda av bulldozern (blir slagna, inspärrade, bespottade, torterade, våldtagna, tvingas se sina nära och kära bli slaktade) blir till ett problem, ett hot (mot ”utvecklingen”) om de inte snabbt som fan glömmer och finner sig ”i det som hänt”. De förpassas snabbt som ögat sig ”historiens åtevändsgränder”; förövaren däremot, han eller hon tycks tillhöra Framtiden.

Jan Süselbeck ist beim Lesen des “Materialien”-Abschlussbandes der Jean-Améry-Werkausgabe der Ignoranz begegnet, mit der Jean Améry zu kämpfen hatte:

“Auffallend dagegen ist die schrille Unangemessenheit so mancher Formulierung aus den Rezensionen über Amérys Werke aus den Sechziger- und Siebzigerjahren, die im Buch ebenfalls dokumentiert sind. Bei ihrer Lektüre wird dem heutigen Leser klarer, in welcher ignoranten Zeit Améry Texte veröffentlichte, wie seinen autobiografischen Leidensbericht ‘Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne’ (1966), in dem er seine Folterung durch die SS vergegenwärtigt. Die deutsche Auseinandersetzung mit der Schoah hatte mit dem Auschwitz-Prozess von 1963 erst zaghaft eingesetzt und war deshalb noch lange nicht bei allen Literaturkritikern angekommen.So bemüht Horst Krüger 1966 in der Zeit die geschichtsklitternde Formel von der “Erniedrigung des Hitlerfaschismus”, durch die Améry gegangen sei. Als wäre der Nationalsozialismus allein durch Hitler zur Wirkung gekommen und als könne man ihn einfach mit dem italienischen Faschismus vergleichen, der den Antisemitismus der Deutschen gar nicht kannte.
Améry selbst weist einen solchen unhistorischen Vergleich bereits in dem Interview von 1978 ausdrücklich zurück.
Karl Korn erwähnt 1968 in der FAZ beiläufig, Améry sei “ein Mann mit einem schweren Lebensschicksal – er ist in Belgien 1944/45 durch Zufall der Liquidation entgangen”. Nicht nur, dass die Datierung falsch war: Die Folterung und die darauf folgende jahrelange Odyssee durch deutsche KZs und Vernichtungslager schrumpft in der unscheinbaren Bemerkung zu einem dubiosen Ereignis, das uninformierte Leser auch als Folge einer Verurteilung für ein hier verschwiegenes Vergehen auffassen konnten. Selbst wohlwollende Stimmen wie die von Alfred Andersch aus einem Essay von 1977 sagen oft mehr über ihre Verfasser aus als über Améry. Andersch kann auch in seiner Würdigung Amérys nicht anders, als den Gelobten als personifizierte Waffe zu imaginieren. Auch wenn er ahnt, wie unpassend der Adressat das finden könnte: “Glatt durchschlägt das Geschoss den Panzer der Systeme. Améry, der sich kaum im Bilde eines Panzerschützen wird erkennen wollen, hat dennoch etwas von David mit der Schleuder.” Die Obsession, selbst Projektil zu werden, stammt von Ernst Jünger.”

First of all, I gotta congratulate Joanne. She was accepted into the South Africa program. She was the only non-doctorate student to be accepted.

See, when I edit stuff, magic things happen. This has been a long weekend. Having the roommates gone was nice. But it went by entirely too fast. Kim won’t be back till Wednesday, so I have one more night to myself in my room. But enough about that. I finally made it to the Hudson. It was nice. And a little chilly. Interestingly, it was also the closest I got to the snow. If you count frozen water at the base of teenage trees anywhere near snow. Being from Southern California, I could probably get away with that, but I’m sure I’d be laughed at. All of those threats of heavy snow were a bunch of lies. Bastards. It’s been in the 20s at night all week. But no snow. I’ve been told to be careful what I wish for but I’m thinking that NYC will have another mild winter. I have another bloody presentation tomorrow. This one is on death. Lovely topic, death.

We read Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and two essays from Jean Amery’s At the Mind’s Limits. I’m going to present on Amery’s essays. He discusses the unnecessary possession of the intellect. He also discusses the omnipresence of death, saying that as prisoners, they were no longer aware of the fact of death but rather the act of dying. What struck me the most about his life was that he committed suicide. After all he discussed about death, he ended up choosing it himself. In some ways, he ended up taking its power from it. Very dreary. Tomorrow will be a good day. I didn’t do much tonight. I worked on this presentation pretty hard and ran out of steam. Tomorrow evening, I continue with whiteness.

Should I set a goal? Why not. By next Monday, I’d like to be on page 12. I’ll keep you posted. I updated the pictures. There are just a few. I’ll try to start taking more. It’s actually fun. In other news, the legality of homosexual fornication is under review. Another reason not to head south. This is all I’ve got. I’m out of practice. I’ll try to come up with some gems when I’m in better writing shape.