A soccer match in Auschwitz: Passing culpability in Holocaust criticism

Representations

Volumn 79, Issue , 2002, Pages 1-27

  Sanyal, Debarati ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950429108     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2002.79.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York, 1989), 55
2. See Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. M. Kandel (New York, 1976), 30
3. and Elie Wiesel, La nuit, (Paris, 1958), 88. Wiesel describes his anger at his father-the victim of the Kapo's blows-for not having known how to avoid enraging the Kapo
4. In her reading of this scene, Inga Clendinnen views the soccer match as a rare example of the "comfortable symbiosis" that occasionally arose between the SS and the SK, affording a momentary recognition of each other's humanity. While such a moment may have been experienced as a brief respite from the relentless horror of the camps, however, the notion of a "comfortable symbiosis" too readily assumes that either squad forgot the grim reality of the SK's eventual execution. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999)
5. Miklos Nyiszli's account suggests that the teams were composed of members from their respective squads. It is Levi's retelling of the scene that opens up this ambiguity
6. "An infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities"; Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 68
7. In Survival in Auschwitz (New York, 1961), 45, Primo Levi calls the German marches accompanying the prisoners at the camp's reveille "the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometric madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards."
8. Borowski, This Way, 84
9. I do not cite Marianne Hirsch as an example of this approach. On the contrary, her analysis of the intergenerational transmission of trauma shows how a medium such as photography enables a self-conscious, nonappropriative, and responsible process of conveying historical trauma. See in particular "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory," Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5-37
10. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, 2001)
11. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2000)
12. Amy Hungerford, "Memorizing Memory," Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 67-92
13. See also Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations 69 (Winter 2000) for an incisive critique of the category of memory (and by extension, trauma) in recent critical discourses that assume "transference" to be an inextricable condition of our relation to the past. Ruth Leys gives a history of the concept of trauma in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and literary criticism to which I am indebted. Her analysis of the tension between mimetic and antimimetic accounts of trauma illuminates the contradictions-and ethical consequences-of claiming that the Holocaust is unrepresentable. My critique of trauma theory's reliance on a model of identification with culpability (rather than victimization) can be read as an elaboration on Leys's suggestive conclusion on the slippage between perpetrator and victim opened up by Cathy Caruth's analysis (see note 19)
14. For a rich and rigorous critique of Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz, see Claudine Kahan and Philippe Mesnard's recent publication, Giorgio Agamben à l'épreuve d'Auschwitz (Paris, 2001). Kahan and Mesnard's book was published after the submission of this article. I have therefore only been able to give their probing interrogation of Agamben's recent work on the Shoah cursory treatment in these footnotes. Kahan and Mesnard examine the importance of aporia in Agamben's work as a figure that systematically disregards the conditions of the concentration camp experience. Confronting Agamben's theoretical formulations with the actual functioning of the camps and specific representations of the Sonderkommando, the Muslim, and the survivor (other than Primo Levi's), they argue that Agamben fails to take into account the importance of history and the social sciences in investigating and transmitting the Shoah. They suggest, more generally, that Agamben's ethical project is compromised by his philosophical abstraction and his aestheticist turn to the aporias of the sublime
15. If for Agamben, politics and biopolitics are irreversibly intertwined in modern configurations of power, it is because sovereign power, in any political structure, bears a constant-if contradictory-relationship to the citizens' bodies. Indeed, "bare life" is always in a relation of "excluded inclusion" with regard to the sovereign power of the state. For while "bare life" lies outside juridical representation, sovereign power has the authority to repeal the order that it instituted (and thereby repeal its exclusion), and indeed, sovereign power exercises its authority thus. Because sovereign power is able to lift the ban on "bare life" by declaring a state of exception that would include it within its juridical order, "bare life" occupies a position of invisible appurtenance to the state
16. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999), 21
17. The documentary concludes with an appeal to our shared responsibility for the camps, one that is perpetuated in our own deafness to the endless cry that continues to resonate across history
18. In that sense, his position is emblematic of the gray zone, and yet all the more irreducible to the sorts of identifications declared by Agamben. It is likely that in this instance, Agamben confuses Levi with Nyiszli, a minor, but suggestive, oversight. On the ambiguity of Nyiszli's position toward the soccer game, see also Kahan and Mesnard, Giorgio Agamben, 38. They point out how the treatment of the gray zone as a zone of radical inversion in which executioners and victims exchanged places overlooks the situation of the Sonderkommandos, who faced the constant threat of death were they to disobey SS orders (including, no doubt, invitations to play a game of soccer). This flattening out and disqualification of the specificity of the Sonderkommandos' experience, conflated here with Nyiszli's and ultimately our own, Kahan and Mesnard suggest, are what allow Agamben to recuperate the Muslim and Primo Levi as exemplary witnesses
19. Another schematization of Levi's reflections occurs in Agamben's description of the Muselman, those who suffered most acutely from starvation and disease. In a reflection on the impossibility of bearing witness to the fate of those who drowned, Levi interrogates his ability to put himself in the place of the other: "I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnessess ... we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 'Muslims,' the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception"; Levi, Drowned, 83-84
20. This passage is central to Agamben's elaboration of a highly problematic opposition between the survivor as "pseudo-witness" and the Muselman as "complete witness": "Testimony appears here as a process that involves at least two subjects: the first, the survivor, who can speak but who has nothing interesting to say; and the second, who "has seen the Gorgon," who "has touched bottom, and therefore has much to say but cannot speak"; Agamben, Remnants, 120
21. Agamben's incorrect paraphrasing of Levi when describing the soccer match as one "played between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkommando" (instead of "that is to say, between a group representing the SS on guard at the crematorium and a group representing the Special Squad"), is again a minor but telling detail, for it fails to take in Levi's own emphasis on the false interchangeability of executioner and victim in the fictional realm of the game
22. Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995), 8
23. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), 24
24. When Caruth speaks of trauma as a structure of entanglement with the other, she does not mean an intersubjective encounter between two self-identical subjects, since traumatic experience signals the breakdown of the psyche's integrity. Rather, she suggests that we are all fractured by an alterity that can never be fully subsumed. Nor does she make sanguine pronouncements about trauma as a basis for community built on identificatory structures of shared or commensurate traumas, but rather, that otherness is constitutive of the self, and it is this common predicament that trauma reveals. For a cogent reading of Caruth's Unclaimed Experience that elucidates her conception of "entanglement," see Petar Ramadanovic, "When 'To Die in Freedom' is written in English," Diacritics 28, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 54-67. Caruth's point that the psychic split occurring in the wake of trauma captures a condition that is constitutive of the human psyche makes an interesting and significant parallel to Agamben's presentation of the Muselman-the concentration camp inmate on the brink of extinction-as a figure for a subjectivity that emerges from a process of radical desubjectification. In both instances, an extreme condition that questions the very basis of identity (traumatic neurosis, radical dehumanization) is revealed to constitute a hidden yet shared condition
25. Ruth Leys gives a careful reading of the slippage between perpetrator and victim in Caruth's analysis of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, showing how Caruth blurs the distinction between inflicting and receiving a wound by presenting Clorinda as Tancred's "other within the self," one who can confess what Tancred, as a subject and victim of trauma, can never truly know: "But her (Caruth's) discussion of Tasso's epic has even more chilling implications. For if, according to her analysis, the murderer Tancred can become the victim of the trauma and the voice of Clorinda a testimony to his wound, then Caruth's logic would turn other perpetrators into victims too-for example, it would turn the executioners of the Jews into victims and the 'cries' of the Jews into testimony to the trauma suffered by the Nazis"; Leys, Trauma, 297
26. We see the consequences of this slippage in Shoshana Felman's reading of the body in The Fall. Felman reads the absent body of the drowned woman in Albert Camus's narrative as the sign of a traumatic history-the bodies that perished in the camps-yet this traumatic history (Auschwitz, the gulag) is in turn dislocated and transformed into a recurrent concept whose existence exceeds its historical occurrence. Felman is quite right to point out the vacillating frames of reference in Camus's text and to propose "le fait concentrationnaire" as the unifying thread between the disparate historical contexts invoked by the novel. Yet it is worth pointing out the paradoxical effect of Felman's historicization of undecideability: even the gulag and its historical particularity is subsumed under the broader vision of a concentration-camp universe and logic whose ultimate incarnation is the Nazi death camp. This conflation of historical fact and transhistorical concept, in the attempt to historically resituate the absent body in Camus's text, evacuates this body of any specificity
27. Dori Laub asserts, with Primo Levi, that even the survivors were not able to bear witness to the camps, not only because, as Levi says and as Agamben elaborates, the survivor did not "touch bottom" and perish, but generally, because the concentration camp was designed to be unintelligible and to strip its inmates of the ability to comprehend and thereby bear witness. See Dori Laub, "Truth and Testimony," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 66. I should specify that my criticism of Testimony is directed at the chapters written by Felman
28. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London, 1992), 200-201
29. In Caruth's account, trauma intertwines knowing and unknowing in the indirect, topological, and aporetic ways characteristic of a literary language. "If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and unknowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet"; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3
30. LaCapra has extensively critiqued Felman's reading of Camus's The Fall both for blurring subject positions such that everyone is a victim in the face of trauma in Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1994), and as a glaring example of her transferential relations to de Man in History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998). While there is much overlap in our critiques of Felman (particularly of the purely structural nature of the correspondences she draws between irreducibly distinct persons and histories), I focus not on the universalization of victimhood but on the fetishism of complicity and redeployment of the gray zone in her analysis. My own reading of Camus's The Fall stems from a dissatisfaction with LaCapra's interpretation of this text as a post-traumatic and disavowed response to the Algerian crisis. LaCapra's investment in "transference" as an explanatory tool for literary analysis, as well as his own privileging of trauma, simplifies his otherwise suggestive reading of the slipperiness of origins and contexts in The Fall. He ends up substituting Algeria for the Holocaust as the novel's central (albeit repressed) trauma, in a reading almost exclusively supported by the essays L'avenir Algérien and Algérie 1958. This claim for a deep historicization (Algeria) that sees beyond the "diversionary screen" (the Holocaust) deployed by Camus and his critics, risks simply substituting one traumatic history for another, thereby privileging a singular historical trauma as the structural core of the narrative, a position that is not so different from Felman's claim for the Holocaust as the latent subtext of all modern narrative. It also overlooks the extent to which La chute may be read as performing its own critique of such belated historicizations. Clamence, after all, inculpates his interlocutor by eliminating the possibility of any context for innocence, thus transforming history into metaphysics
31. Amy Hungerford has argued that recent theorizations of trauma by Felman and Caruth posit it as an experience without a subject, a floating force whose existence and transmission occurs through language alone. With LaCapra, she shows how the textualization of experience in deconstruction and trauma theory has allowed critics to identify with victims of the Holocaust. Hungerford focuses on the process of this transformation of experience (and people) into memorizable language, or text, rather than the ethical dimension of this dislocation of history or personhood. She argues that imitation-or memorization-of past texts can take the place of experience and furnish the basis for personal identity, thus allowing readers as disparate as Shoshana Felman and Binjamin Wilkomirski to identify with the Holocaust as victims; Hungerford, "Memorizing Memory," 67-92
32. Citations in the original refer to La chute (Paris, 1956), 19
33. Citations from the English translation are from The Fall, trans. J. O'Brien (New York, 1956), 15
34. That Camus is referring here to the concentration camps is quite plausible, for in his response to Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Jeanson's critique of L'homme révolté, he berates their failure to address the soviet camps using the very same expression; "quitte à m'accuser de ne pas me placer au coeur des choses"; Albert Camus, "Lettre au directeur des Temps Modernes," Les Temps Modernes (June 1952): 329
35. Albert Camus, Essais (Paris, 1965), 589. My translation
36. Claude Lanzmann, "Hier Ist Kein Warum," in Lanzmann, Au sujet de Shoah (Paris, ed., Berlin, 1990): 279
37. As Thomas Trezise has pointed out in a compelling critique of the concept of the "ineffable" in approaches to the Holocaust, this doubleness is captured in the very term unspeakable; Thomas Trezise, "Unspeakable," Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 39-66
38. As Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has suggested, transmissions of the Holocaust can be mapped along two poles-the first views the Shoah as the founding event of our (post)modernity one spelling the breakdown of all existing ethico-political frameworks. The other pole proposes a more supple and mediated relationship to history, leaving open a play of norms, a "before" and "after" Auschwitz, and conceiving of testimony as a discourse in which metaphor and imaginative recreation have their place. If this latter position claims poetry's power to defy history, it does not, according to Ezrahi, succumb to the therapeutic solace of the aesthetic, decried by Theodor Adorno's dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. See Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Representing Auschwitz," History and Memory (Fall/Winter 1996): 139-42
39. For an analysis of how a film such as Life Is Beautiful conjures up the genuinely contestatory power of the comic and the imagination in the face of Nazism, see Ezrahi's "After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?" Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 287-313
40. I find Dominick LaCapra's model of "acting out" and "working through" to be too restrictive, if not prescriptive, to recognize fully the ways in which representations of the Holocaust successfully negotiate the demands of self-consciousness, moral responsibility, affect, and imagination. Almost all the works examined in his books are criticized for "acting out" rather than "working through" their transferential relationship to trauma, even those that most thoughtfully reflect upon the ethics of their representational choices. Thus, in History and Memory After Auschwitz, LaCapra complains that Art Spiegelman insufficiently scrutinizes his own subject position vis-à-vis his material. I would argue that, on the contrary, Spiegelman offers us one of the most acute reflections on the tense balance between self-conscious positioning and imaginative recreation demanded by his father's experience. In one memorable scene that provides its own meditation on transference (and would perfectly illustrate LaCapra's conception of "working through" trauma without mastering it), Art has shrunk to childlike proportions after being verbally assaulted by people asking him to comment on his book, a diminishment that could be symbolic of the secondary witness' loss of selfhood in the face of a trauma not experienced firsthand. As he discusses with his therapist his father's possible guilt for having survived the concentration camp, it is clear that we are also witnessing the reverberations of the survivor's guilt in the son's psyche. Significantly, it is one of the only scenes in which the central metamorphic conceit of the text (representing people as animals) is fully exposed, and where the masks are presented as masks and are visibly tied to the faces of Art and his therapist. We thus witness a dizzying, self-conscious layering of representational artifice: a cartoon of shrunken Art, whose head protrudes out of his mask as he faces a therapist-a survivor-who also is visibly masked as a mouse and yet gazes at a photo of his pet cat. ... "Does it suggest that the analytic session is as artificial as a tv interview?" asks LaCapra when commenting on this scene. Perhaps. Yet in foregrounding the session's artificiality, it accomplishes exactly the kind of interruption of transference that LaCapra finds lacking in Spiegelman's text. The reader is compelled to recognize the layering of self-conscious mediation involved in this transmission of the Holocaust. Further, the therapeutic context is not presented as healing first- or secondhand trauma, but rather, as an opportunity to explore gaps between people and histories, while enabling flashes of insight: "What was it like in the camps?" Art asks his therapist, also a survivor, "Well, it was like this: 'BOO!' Only all the time"; Art Spiegelman, Maus II (New York, 1986), 46