Outline Singularity, Evil, and the Everyday

The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life by John Sanbonmatsu For what are probably quite complicated and contradictory reasons, we are attracted, as a society and as individuals, to representations of historical mass trauma--the intentional infliction of extreme violence on one group of people by another. In the late20th century, commemoration and memorialization became minor industries, not because it was only then that we human beings began behaving badly toward one another, but because it was during the 20th C. that we managed to inflict quantitatively greater harm on one another, and with far greater efficiency, than we had ever managed before. The rise of powerful nation states armed with highly destructive modern technologies made possible the implementation of a whole new scale of atrocity and extermination. We have come to believe—and perhaps it is true—that quantitative increase in the infliction of harm at some point translates into qualitative transformation of evil. The new problem of magnitude of atrocity has raised a host of unsettling and difficult questions about representation, about theodicy and the intractability of the problem of evil, and about the ultimate significance and immanent value of the human race. First and foremost, we are collectively drawn to the contemplation of traumatic mass events because of their ontological irreducibility. Contra the poststructuralist cant that language or discourse is prior to experience, we are living, embodied, animal beings before we are discursive ones. This is say, we suffer and die. Mortality silences all doubt 2 as to what is real and what is not. Historical trauma is prior to all signification, because death and suffering signify themselves. The Holocaust was not in the first instance a discourse about anything, it was, and remains, a tear in the fabric of Being. As long as memory of a traumatic event persists, that event itself gestures, indicts, accuses. So long as the memory of trauma exists, the event is real phenomenologically, which is to say existentially. It persists because it is real, and so demands from us a response. The nature of that response, however, its limits and contradictions, is always in question. The precise facts of any given genocide or atrocity are always in dispute, always subject to interpretation. And precisely because the stakes are so high in confronting human evil on a great scale, genocides as such can be, and are, denied all the time. At least since Hannah Arendt‟s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, many intellectuals have tried to come to terms with the quotidian aspects of genocidal campaigns like Nazism--the rootedness of extreme forms of violence in seemingly ordinary or banal institutions, ideologies, habits of thought, and so on. In her famous account of Adolph Eichmann, who as head of the Office of Jewish Emigration for the Gestapo oversaw many of the logistical details of the Holocaust, Arendt thus emphasized Eichmann‟s ordinariness, depicting him as a petty, unimaginative bureaucrat who might otherwise have lived out his days as a competent but unremarkable actuarial. In contrast to traditional accounts of the problem of evil, which depicted it (in Seyla Benhabib‟s words) “in metaphysical terms as ultimate depravity, corruption, or sinfulness,” Arendt emphasized evil as a habit of thought and 3 disposition to social life characterized by individual “thoughtlessness.”1 And such thoughtlessness, Arendt believed, is now a condition of our time, an accompaniment to and byproduct of mass society, bureaucracy, and the fetish of technological progress. “We are perhaps the first generation,” she wrote in The Human Condition, “which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that force one to admit that all means, provided they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end.”2 For Arendt, this dangerous “line of thought,” the reduction of human beings to unthinking, obedient subjects incapable of seeing beyond their own narrow and compartmentalized perspective, ran beneath totalitarian and liberal societies alike. Rothberg identifies two broad approaches in mainstream historiography of the Holocaust, what he terms realist and antirealist positions. The realist position, of which Arendt‟s analysis is the paradigmatic case, locates the Holocaust on a continuum with the everyday and otherwise unremarked features of modern civil society. Thus, notwithstanding its unique features and significance as a form of historical trauma, the Holocaust can be understood vis-à-vis the emergence of modern bureaucratic society, which cultivates habits of thought inimical to politics and to the examined life. Arendt‟s approach has since been elaborated by Zygmunt Bauman and others, who have emphasized the Shoah‟s relation to modern social institutions.3 1 2 Seyla Benhabib, “Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in Villa, p. 75. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 229 (emphasis added). Quoted in Mary G. Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” in Dana Villa, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 98. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989). Arne Johann Vetlesen has rightly complicated Bauman‟s Arendtian account of genocide by drawing attention to the very personal, close-up, and fully “conscious” modes of violence adopted by perpetrators of atrocity. Bauman‟s emphasis on the role of social distantiation—the mitigation of the natural empathetic response by bureacuracy and other mediating institutions of society—in atrocity, while not mistaken, tends to downplay the many 4 In contrast, “anti-realist” critics have chosen to emphasize the extremity of the Holocaust and its persistence as historical disjuncture or rupture. Novelist Elie Wiesel, for example, has argued against sociological interpretations of the Shoah, arguing that “„Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized‟” but in fact “„transcends history.‟”4 Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, have taken the view that one could not (and should not) find an affirmative meaning in the Nazi genocide, i.e. in sociological explanations, an incommensurability and radicality of otherness Lyotard designated the différend.5 This debate between realists and antirealists is pregnant with significance not only for the specific historiography of the Holocaust, but indeed for any discussion we might have of singularities as such—i.e., seemingly irreducibly unique traumatic events like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, or the genocide in Rwanda, which are of such magnitude and horror--in a word, evil--that they appear, from the antirealist position, to exceed the bounds of historical, political, sociological, and even moral intelligibility. As a supposed totem of radical historical and moral disjuncture, singularity describes or traces an imaginary limit between ideal evil and what we take as “normality” or everyday life. In this paper, I want to consider some of the ways in which the discourse of holocaust and mass historical trauma, precisely by inviting us to confer perceptual, cognitive, and moral prominence on “singular” events, leads us away from examination instances in which individuals wanted to injure other human beings, actively hated them and wished their destruction, etc. As Vetlesen suggests, genocide and other acts of evil manifest along two axes, distance and proximity, corresponding in their ways to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. 4 Quoted in Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 5. 5 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998), p. 193. 5 of our own complicity in suffering and injustice in the present. In particular, I want to examine two of the ways that the very notion of singularity, through commemoration and memorialization, may function to cordon off the political. First, singularity elides the political insofar as it aestheticizes trauma, invoking in us an experience of the sublime: a kind of awe or wonder at the sheer magnitude of the horror, a humility and fearfulness before power which nonetheless resolves in the subject‟s recuperation of his or her own sense of invulnerability, achieved through an aesthetic distance. Second, and relatedly, singularity is depoliticizing insofar as it implicitly treats the everyday, hence too quotidian violence and injustice, as the perceptual background or horizon against which that presumed to be singular gathers ontological and hence ethical weight. In other words, for singularity to be intelligible, to command our attention as a determinate shape or form, it must naturalize violence as ordinary, hence acceptable. By concentrating on what is irreducible and strange, the discourse of singularity draws our attention away from our own participation in injustice in the present. Holocausts and the Kantian Sublime It is an unfortunate if obvious characteristic of singular historical traumas that in every case we only attend to them in retrospect, i.e. after their terror has subsided and the unspeakable has happened. Singularity always plunges us into the problem of representation—of how to re-present something that has already happened, something, 6 moreover, in which many of the original victims may be dead, hence unable to speak for themselves. In this context, the notion that singularities might in some way be “sublime,” at least in the narrow sense of exceeding our capacities of imagination, hence of representation and understanding, was already hinted at in Mary McCarthy‟s excoriation of journalist John Hersey‟s account of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (published in 1946 in The New Yorker). McCarthy complained that Hersey‟s book ...[minimized] the atom bomb by treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes--fires, flood, earthquakes--which we have always had with us....The interview with the survivors, is the classic technique for reporting such events--it serves well enough to give some sense, slightly absurd but nonetheless correct, of the continuity of life. But with Hiroshima, where the continuity of life was, for the first time, put into question, and by man, the existence of any survivors is an irrelevancy; and the interview with the survivors is an insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare. To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead.6 Implicit in McCarthy‟s critique was a critique of the reduction of singularity to a comfortable, bourgeois aesthetic. The New Yorker, McCarthy wrote, “can only assimilate 6 Mary McCarthy, “The Hiroshima „New Yorker,‟” Politics, Oct. 1946. Quoted in Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998), p. 303. 7 the atomic bomb to itself, to Westchester County, to smoked turkey, and the Hotel Carlyle.”7 Another, far more common touchstone for today‟s debate about representation and holocaust (broadly construed) is Theodor Adorno‟s remark, in an essay written shortly after World War II, that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”8 In arguing that writing poetry about the Holocaust must be barbaric, Adorno was not arguing that we should fall silent in the face of trauma and catastrophe. Rather, he was concerned that representation to achieve possibly cheap emotional effects might yield to the aestheticization of trauma: to representations of the Holocaust that might somehow reduce it to spectacle. Yet some “antirealist” philosophers and critics have in fact situated the Holocaust (in Rothberg‟s words) “as a sublime, unapproachable object beyond discourse and knowledge.”9 In the face of unspeakable evil, these critics seem to say, the correct moral stance is necessarily one of mute reverence and, in a word, incomprehension. Hence the position taken by filmmaker Claude Lanzmann: “The Holocaust is unique first of all in that it erects around itself, in a circle of flames, a limit which cannot be breached because a certain absolute is intransmissable: to claim to do so is to make oneself guilty of the most serious sort of transgression.”10 7 8 McCarthy. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in 1949 and published in 1952 in Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 9 Rothberg, p. 4. Emphasis added. 10 Claude Lanzmann, “De l‟Holocauste à Holocauste” (1979), quoted in Rothberg, p. 232. Lanzmann‟s notion of a “limit” before an absolute is here virtually identical to Jean-François Lyotard‟s conception of the différend, by which he gestures both to the absolute of difference between and among different linguistic groups, radical alterity and incommensurability, as well as to the impossibility of any form of representation being adequate to its object, which is epistemologically boundless, because the subject of 8 This notion of a “limit which cannot be breached” calls to mind Kant‟s remarks on the analytic of the sublime. In fact, I want to suggest that our encounter with representations of singularity is not as removed as one might think from aesthetic experience in general and the experience of the sublime in particular. Kant identified two different kinds or qualities of aesthetic experience, the beautiful and the sublime. While our experience of the beautiful involves us in appreciation of a particular aesthetic object‟s form, hence defines a limit in our experience that allows us to exercise our powers of judgment, the sublime by contrast is an encounter with an object that has no “finality” of form and is therefore “limitlessness.”11 One encounters the sublime especially in great, powerful phenomena of such vast power and scale that they over-awe us, confront us with our own seeming fragility and vulnerability. Sublime phenomena signify their own “magnitude and power,” but also threaten “chaos” and the “wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation.”12 Natural phenomena such as storms, oceans, mountains, and so on, are paradigmatic of the experience of the sublime, but architectural monuments like St. Peter‟s Basilica can elicit in us a similar response. What is key is that unlike the beautiful (determinate form), which invites our use of our cognitive and perceptual capacities, our imagination, the sublime must “not be tainted with any judgement of understanding or knowing itself is always already multiple. François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minnepolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Lyotard and other poststructuralist critics have embraced the postmodern sublime, an aesthetic and ecstatic celebration of the open-endedness of representation and the instability and multiplicity of the subject. As Mann shows in her extensive and illuminating critique of Lyotard, Judith Butler, and other poststructuralists, this invocation of the sublime is problematic in all sorts of ways from a feminist and political perspective. 11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 101, 90. 12 Ibid, p. 92. 9 reason.”13 Indeed, it is only “sublime” to the very extent that it is experienced as “an outrage on the imagination”14--“an abyss in which [imagination] fears to lose itself.”15 We open ourselves to the sublime precisely at the moment when we let go of all positive descriptions of the phenomenon, cease trying to contain and tame it to our scientific utilitarian expectations and descriptions. Thus, Kant asks us to see the ocean not in the first instant as “a spacious realm of aquatic creatures,” or as a means of navigation and trade, but as a “calm, a clear mirror of water bounded only by the heavens, or, be it disturbed, as threatening to overwhelm and engulf everything.”16 The pleasure we take in the sublime is thus complicated, but exquisitely so. The mind is attracted and “repelled” at the same time, drawn less by a feeling of pleasure, in fact, than “admiration and respect.”17 Standing before a mountain prospect or raging river, we feel “astonishment amounting almost to terror, the awe and thrill of devout feeling.”18 Two questions arise. The first is psychological: why would we should seek out, and experience pleasure from, such overwhelming, even terrifying experiences? The second is philosophical: why would Kant, arch-rationalist that he was, find the sublime to be so, well, sublime? If the sublime indeed inundates or paralyzes our capacity for judgment, for reason, why would Kant, who saw his project as defending the moral sovereignty of the reasoning subject against empiricism and positivism, grant the sublime an even higher aesthetic value? 13 14 Ibid, p. 101. Ibid, p. 91. 15 Ibid, p. 107. 16 Ibid, p. 122. 17 Ibid, p. 90. 18 Ibid, p. 120. 10 Answering the first question in fact answers the second. The sublime is aesthetic because the fear or terror we experience is not real fear or terror. Watching a terrific storm from comparative safety under an eave or inside a mountain cave, we are able to appreciate its power because we know it ultimately poses no real threat to us. On the one hand, we are humbled and awed by a phenomenon which cannot be contained by reason. On the other hand, our sense of the phenomenon is leavened by a “super-added thought of its totality.”19 Thus, at the very moment when we are being humbled by that which is boundless and limitless, that which appears to us most other and hence least assimilable to reason and the sovereign self, our mind nonetheless becomes aware of itself as that which is able to take in and, at a transcendent level, contain that which ostensibly stands over and against us. At the moment of our encounter with the sublime, Kant writes, the subject ...[attempts] to gain access to it through imagination, for the purpose of feeling the might of this faculty in combining the movement of the mind thereby aroused with its serenity, and of thus being superior to internal and, therefore, external, nature, so far as the latter can have any bearing upon our feeling of wellbeing....[Imagination] is a might enabling us to assert our independence as against the influences of nature, to degrade what is great in respect of the latter to what is little, and thus to locate the absolutely great only in the proper estate of the Subject.20 19 20 Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 121. 11 What is crucial for Kant is that “sublimity [is] discoverable [only] in the mind” itself. This is because the sublime object “cannot be contained in any sensual form,” i.e. as a determinate object of perception.21 Precisely in encountering the limits of empirical and sensorial determinacy, the subject is thrown back onto an awareness of mind as a “supersensible” faculty,22 hence too of his a priori knowledge of his own essence as pure subjectivity, the seat of a pure ontological freedom that cannot be degraded or diminished by what is external or (in the ethical realm) heteronomous. The sublime thus ironically emerges as a kind of exercise that allows the subject to experience an enlarged sense of self. A surprising reversal is effected. Faced with the sublime, we encounter not something external to us, but a “ground” which is “in ourselves,”23 namely a disposition of the mind toward the infinite. It is “precisely because” our minds strive toward infinity and totality that the “inability on the part of our faculty for the estimation of the magnitude of things” awakens in us “a feeling of a supersensible faculty within us....”24 For “the mere ability even to think [the sublime] as a whole indicates a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense.”25 Mind “feels itself elevated in its own estimate of itself on finding all the might of imagination still unequal to its ideas.”26 Our encounter with limitlessness retains transcendental value because it conjures up the “boundlessness” of our own imagination. The sublime thus evokes a complicated psychological response, but one whose resolution, in Kant‟s ontology of reason, is never in doubt. We are made humble before 21 22 Ibid, p. 92. Emphasis added. Ibid, p. 103. 23 Ibid, p. 93. 24 Ibid, p. 97. Emphasis added. 25 Ibid, p. 102 (original emphasis). 26 Ibid, p. 105. 12 the sublime object. Our senses fail us, and we are over-awed by the sheer magnitude or scale of the phenomenon. In the same instant, however, we suddenly realize our own powers of transcendence and freedom, and so overcome our feeling of being overcome, of being overwhelmed. According to Crowther, “Kant...suggests that, although we recognize that some object has the capacity to destroy us, we can, from a position of safety, imagine ourselves as morally resistant even in the face of destruction.”27 We encounter “an object of extreme destructive power,” one in which we are compelled “to consider possible or actual effects so enormously devastating as to exceed our perceptual and imaginative capacities.” However, through what Kant called the “dynamical” sublime we come to realize that we are greater than that enormity, precisely insofar as we can grasp its grandeur.28 I wonder if something like this does not happen when we stand mute before a heap of shoes at museums of the Jewish holocaust. We approach singularity hat in hand, humbled by the sheer magnitude of the suffering and violence involved. To “participate” in the event, we prepare ourselves by becoming emotionally and psychologically vulnerable. We adjust our comportment and affect in a way that makes us open and attuned to what is there. Yet this openness is conditioned or overdetermined in advance by our awareness that we are to be experiencing something overwhelming, terrifying, beyond comprehension, “inhuman” or beyond human. We thus stand in horror, but also in awe, before something external of overwhelming scale and power. At the same time, because the object has been reduced to representation—scholarly discourse, museum display, archival footage, etc.—we are able to distance ourselves from it. We are 27 Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 148. Emphasis added. 28 Ibid, pp. 148-149. 13 surrounded by the artifacts of fear, of true terror, true horror and evil, without being crushed by them. Perhaps we are able, briefly, to imagine ourselves in the empty shoes left over from the children shipped to Dachau or Treblinka. But we do so knowing full well that we ourselves are safe: that we are not at risk of being sent to such places ourselves. But this feeling is not merely one of secret psychic relief. Through our direct encounter with the “supersensible,” with an Event beyond limit, we also thereby imagine ourselves to be “morally resistant” to evil. In standing mute before singularity we in fact cannot help but participate in an idealization about our own powers of moral and spiritual redemption, powers we gain through the act of bearing witness, of commemoration and memorialization, rituals of remembrance that give meaning to singularity and imbue it with its special cathartic and redeeming power. We walk away feeling weak, sickened, but also, perhaps, elated: relieved that we have “faced” the horror and overcome it. The fact that we have of course done no such thing, that what we have experienced is only the shadow of a shadow of the Real, is forgotten. To be sure, the aesthetic distance that attends any form of representation of trauma can be the starting point of critical consciousness, of reflection, of an active “working through” of the past. The moral and educational value of memorialization and commemoration is not to be forgotten or demeaned. In pursuing this line of thought, I do not mean to suggest that we do approach or experience the peace museum in Hiroshima in exactly the same way that we approach and experience a grand architectural monument or natural phenomenon. We may cry, tremble, feel sick in our gut. Yet this very cathartic response may be a further indication that our experience is not “merely” moral and intellectual, but aesthetic. If it were not, why would we go to a museum about the 14 atomic bomb at all? Who would willingly choose to experience, even third hand and glancingly, the horror of being boiled alive, or seeing your child decapitated, or being skinned alive by glass blown from the shock wave after the initial blast? One feels a call of responsibility, of the moral necessity to bear witness to the inhumanity of our kind to others. But can we deny that there is also a fascination in seeing, a pleasure in the visual? Or in the corresponding feelings of safety and even moral superiority that attend our experiences too? Superiority because by bearing witness not to atrocity, but to representation of atrocity, we elevate ourselves above the indifferent or culpable individuals of the past, those who let this happen. Is there not, then, in our witnessing of witness, a dimension of the sublime--“„enjoyment but with horror,‟” as Kant termed it?29 Ironically, the sublime also enters into discourses about singularity from a decidely different direction: some scholars have compared the jouissance of fascism, the pleasure in submerging the self within the mass, to an aesthetic of the sublime. Dominick LaCapra argues that the Nazis may have engaged in a “negative sublime” of violence, a “secular sacred” in which fanatical violence and communalism represented an attempt by the perpetrators “to transvalue trauma into a disconcerting source of elation [Rausch] and transcendence.”30 As Friedlander similarly writes, the Nazis manifested “a growing elation stemming from repetition, from the ever-larger numbers of the killed others”—“a compelling lust for killing on an immense scale.”31 National Socialism, by aestheticizing politics--turning war and killing into forms of public, expressivist art, replacing 29 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. J. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 46. Cited in Crowther, p. 9. 30 La Capra, p. 4. In this work as well as in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994), LaCapra develops a thesis also advanced by Saul Friedlander in Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 109-115. 31 Friedlander, pp. 110-111, quoted in LaCapra, p. 33. 15 individual moral conscience with obedience to an idealized father figure, surrounding the individual with a vast “second nature” of flowing red banners, mass rallies and spectacle—had the effect of humbling the individual. While “out” or persecuted social groups like Jews, homosexuals, and Roma were frozen in real terror before this controlled chaos of violence, those on the inside of it, including millions of ordinary Germans, could experience the thrill of being exposed to terror, to naked power, but from a position of relative safety as part of the volk. In this case, the volk was itself the sublime object itself: the subject was awed by its own participation in a collective fantasy of omnipotence. This would seem quite different from Kant‟s sublime, where the transcendence experienced by the German citizen was not of his or her infinite powers in the abstract, i.e. as a nothingness, a pure ontological freedom, but rather a transcendence of the human community, of conventional morality, through German nationalism and militarism. Yet the aesthetics of fascism are not as removed from Kantian aesthetics as one might hope. As Bonnie Mann has shown in her important critique of the Kantian sublime and its uses by poststructuralist feminists and philosophers, Kant “elevates” the subject by humiliating and degrading nature and the other, above all the feminine other. Kant‟s conception of aesthetic value was rooted in a European worldview that denied any immanent value in nature, reducing it to opportunities for appreciating and realizing our own essential freedom as reasoning subjects. The “delight” we feel in the sublime is due to the fact, as Kant himself puts it, “nature [sinks] into insigificance before the ideas of reason....”32 As Mann suggests, the aesthetic of the sublime in fact “functions as a mode 32 Kant, p. 105. 16 of Euro-masculine self-constitution,” a way of overcoming the subject‟s own locatedness in space and time by excluding others.33 “The very possibility of erecting a convincing edifice of freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty rested on what he [the sovereign subject of reason] did with these Others,” viz. women and racialized peoples in what we now call the Third World. Kant‟s sovereign subject as such--the disembodied self of reason—can thus be seen to resonate with (if not, in its modest way, enable) white European racism, genocide and the ruthless annihilation of natural others. The aesthetic of the sublime, thus, emerges out of the imperialism of a male subject who abhors dependency, who asserts his will against otherness, against the uncontrolled and uncontrollable. The distance between, on the one hand, the Kantian subject‟s joy before his own powers of transcendence in opposing (feminine) nature, and, on the other, the fascist attempt to contain the “flood” of the feminine, of feeling and desire, whether through sexual repression (the rigorous self-discipline of the Gestapo, with its accompanying misogyny) or through choreographed mass rallies and parades,34 may thus not be as great as one would think. As Mann suggests, the sublime was from the beginning evocative of extreme forms of violence. To the extent that the spectacle of singularity participates in an aesthetic of the sublime, therefore, should perhaps give us pause. Does this overstate things? The massive scale of the singular atrocity strikes us mute. We lose, or rather surrender, our capacity for speech and action. In this moment of passivity, we become aware not only of the protean and boundless nature of human “Therefore the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we atrribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our self—the Subject).” Kant, p. 106. 33 Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Environment (Oxford, 2006). 34 Klaus Theweleit, Masculine Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway, Minneapolis 1987. 17 cruelty, but also are faced existentially with, and are in some measure grateful for, the fact of our own personal survival and even invulnerability in the present. Aesthetic distance also evokes in us a sense of our own superiority as a form of life capable of memorialization. Through museum exhibits, films, and other critical representations of holocaust, we find redemption for ourselves and our kind. We can celebrate ourselves as that kind of being who, though unable to escape the past, nonetheless is able to tame it. The holocaust sublime may thus even reproduce the very narcissism and grandiosity of the human subject that implicates humanity in continuing atrocity, war, oppression of other creatures, and the destruction of the ecosystem (a point I will return to at the end of my paper). Representations of singularity can be a leaping off point for deeper explorations of the human psyche and society than would otherwise be possible when contemplating quotidian violence. Commemoration and memorialization of such events opens up a complicated and productive existential and ethical space insofar it at once throws the participant back on his or her own thoughts, which are irreducibly unique and particular to the individual person, and at the same time constitute a form of representation that is necessarily monological. The very silence that accompanies the act of commemoration on the one hand imposes on us, and the victims, a certain dignity. Through one‟s silence, one sacralizes the suffering, bears witness to it. We participate passively in the sacred the way a congregation attends a sermon or mass: we are humble, observant, attuned to the sacred nature of our own participation in the ritual. While critical memorialization engages the critical faculties, therefore, it can also produce in the subject a feeling of abjection, humility, and even transcendence. There is arguably a quasi-religious and 18 aesthetic dimension to our experience of bearing witness to singularity. The space of commemoration is the space of the sacred because it suspends the ordinary, hence the profane. The temporal is set aside for brief participation in an evil so massive that it collapses in upon itself and disappears into the eternal. Memorials to war and atrocity are rituals commemorating precisely that which lies outside of and against life. One walks through a museum about the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, or the killing fields in Cambodia, or the Middle Passage of African slaves to America, in respectful silence—willfully allowing oneself to drift out into an ocean of stillness. Is there not, however, an aesthetic, even faintly utopian dimension to this loss of self—an experience of Eros, a sense of merging with the other, with a unified “humanity” as concept and as ideal? Memorialization and Sacralization: The Anne Frank Museum The dilemma facing all sites of commemoration of singularity is how to represent the unrepresentable. Adorno‟s remark about poetry and the Holocaust could indeed apply to any phenomenon--the particular, the real, can never be represented without in some way mutilating and reducing it. The problem of representation is made particularly acute in the context of mass society. In representing historical trauma, intellectuals and cultural producers must somehow “package” that trauma in such a way that it is intelligible and at the same time accessible to the mass. The incomprehensible magnitude of the terror and suffering must be summoned and tamed at the same time. A contradiction here emerges between on the one hand representing something unique and 19 singular, something Absolute, and at the same time representing something that everyone can and should experience. This tension or contradiction is apparent at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, where the site of the Franks‟ extended confinement has become the object of public pilgrimmage. Even on weekdays, the lines of people waiting to enter the Museum snake around the block. Despite their best intentions, the Museum‟s curators have created a tourist “attraction.” To control the crowds and make the experience efficient, the “museum-goer” is asked to surrender her autonomy by following a rigid, predetermined path through the building. She or he cannot but feel processed, forced through a relentlessly linear, maze-like series of passages, stairs, and rooms. It is difficult to linger over particular artifacts, let alone to get any proprioceptive sense of particular rooms--their aura and intimacy for those who once dwelled and worked inside them— while being shoved and jostled. In truth, a disturbing irony attends the experience, as one joins hundreds of others on this march through a private space that is on the one hand strangely devoid of life (the original furniture has long since disappeared (or been put into storage for the sake of efficiency?) yet on display in the most brutally intrusive ways: one gawks at the Franks‟ personal artifacts, at the magazine photographs of movie stars glued to the wall by Anne, in what feels like voyeurism. To be sure, the poignancy remains, an afterimage of our knowledge of the terrible fate befell Anne and her family. Yet that experience is mediated through the experience of the mass. That, and consumer culture: at the end of the exhibit, one can take home a souvenir of the Anne Frank franchise: books, videos, and postcards. One hesitates to say it, but Anne Frank and her family have almost been reduced to kitsch—well-meaning 20 and tasteful kitsch, but kitsch nonetheless. The literary intimacy of the bond that emerges between Anne and “Kitty,” and by extension “between” Anne and us, cannot but be shattered by the specular space of the museum, overbrimming with multi-media exhibits, videos, etc. One imagines that only museum employees arriving in the quiet, early morning hours could have any feeling for the piercing solitude and vulnerability of that place, the heavy stillness that must have filled the air as the occupants calmed themselves as Otto Frank‟s employees arrived at work. To be sure, confronting historical trauma in a museum like the Anne Frank Museum, one‟s critical faculties are engaged. One reads the exhibition placards or programs, examines artifacts, steps back in order to contemplate the phenomenon. Yet this very contemplative aspect to our witness, as I have indicated, inevitably opens up an aesthetic dimension. Furthermore, this aesthetic dimension is cathartic. In ancient Greeks, catharsis offered a way for citizens to confront actual dilemmas and tensions in Athenian culture. Watching a tragedy unfold, i.e. at a distance, the audience could experience emotional and psychological release. Being a spectator to a tragic representation was a way of being cleansed and hence, in a way, healed. Is catharsis not also signaled in memorialization of singularity? In imagining that we are bearing witness, are we ourselves not in some way relieved or rid of a psychological burden? Contemplation of singularity differs from contemplation of art and the beautiful in the affective response it demands from us, and which we freely give. This response is framed as an attachment to human figures, strangers, who come in some way to “double” for our own suffering and alienation. Catharsis implies cathexis. Sites of pilgrimmage to 21 trauma come to possess an aura of the sacred, and this aura implicates our own ego needs. By visiting the Anne Frank Museum, seeing the secret annex where Anne and her family and friends hid from the Nazis, we enter into a sacralized space, one where we might enter into a personal encounter with the young girl whose emotional life and tragic fate we have before cathected with through reading her extraordinary diary. This desire for connection with hints at a deep psychic need in the spectator-participant to bond with the iconized figure. It is crucial that this stranger to whom we have bonded be both beloved and abject. The silent cruelty of “normal” human life, the injustice of both everyday marginalization (cf. the extraordinary outpouring of public grief for Lady Diana after her death) and spectacular genocide (Holocaust), stirs in us an inconsolable grief over what we ourselves have lost or perhaps never had--love, connection, understanding, safety. Would we be so drawn to Anne‟s own inner life, so obscure to those around her, if our own inner life was not in some way cut off from the world too? Would so many millions have been drawn to Lady Diana, if they had not subconsciously identified with her thwarted personal struggle for recognition? Are we not drawn to particular kinds of mourning because they fulfill an ego need in us? Is this ego need as innocent of power as we assume? I could not help, shuffling through the Museum with hundreds of others one chilly summer day, to be reminded of the film footage of hundreds of black Americans waiting patiently in line to enter the bullet-torn home of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Oakland, California, in December 1969, after Hampton was brutally gunned down in his home by Oakland police. In that case, because Hampton‟s murder had occurred in the context of an active political struggle the crowds were there to bear witness to an event 22 that had just happened, as an act of political solidarity, defiance, and communal mourning. By contrast, in the Anne Frank Museum the witnessing subject, the “we,” is anonymous and large beyond measure or identification—“humanity” as such. “We” bear witness to what “we” ourselves, or rather a portion of us, once did. Witness is shorn of its political content....This thought, at any rate, came to me standing outside Museum, when I struck up a conversation with a young couple also waiting in the interminable line. The young man was a pro-Bush Republican and Rush Limbaugh fan from the American midwest. The young woman was a middle-class Colombian who told me, in so many words that because democracy wasn‟t working in her country, the people needed a strong hand, i.e authoritarian leader, to bring things under control. It struck me as ironic that a young couple would express such open and naive authoritarian sentiments, all the while standing in line for an hour for a chance to the see the attic where Anne Frank penned her journal—i.e., before the authoritarians of her own time carted her and her sister off to Bergen Belsen. Clearly, in memorializing singularity, it is difficult not to evacuate the Event of its continuing political significance in the present. Commemoration creates a link between the past and present, but too often in such a way as to inoculate the latter against the claims made by the former. In truth, this is not quite fair. To the credit of the Anne Frank Museum curators, the museum-goer traveling through the house ends with an interactive media exhibit highlighting contemporary political issues. When I toured the Museum two years ago, patrons could enter a darkened hall where a video played about immigration, violence, and civil rights in Europe today. At various moments, the film would pause, allowing members of the audience to indicate their opinion about, e.g., the proper balance between 23 civil liberties and security. Although there was something alienating about the exhibit— throughout, we in the audience remained unknown and anonymous to one another—the exhibit interpellated the individual as individual, i.e. asking him or her to reflect on social and political questions in the present. As democratic pedagogy about the origins of violence, this was all quite laudable, even if the presentation, in striking a classically liberal, i.e. neutral or value-free, political stance, also reflected the unexamined contradictions of Dutch and European liberalism. In fact, this nexus, between representation of trauma and liberalism as ideology and institution, has not been sufficiently highlighted. As the violent controversy over the decision by a Danish newspaper to publish anti-Islamic cartoons earlier this year suggests, European liberalism and “toleration” in fact often masks underlying racist and exclusionary attitudes and practices. Even in Amsterdam, the enobling narrative of human redemption rests side by side with smaller scale atrocities. Strolling around Amsterdam later that night (after my visit to the Anne Frank Museum), I wandered into city‟s infamous red light district. Dozens of mostly nude women—some, perhaps, not much older than Anne Frank--stood in front of glass doors and windows, while hundreds of passersby, mostly men, methodically and unashamedly gawked at them. Here were women—and their pimps—from Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, shipped in “like cattle” to cater to the sexual fantasies of Dutch and foreign men. Yet sex trafficking is seen not for what it really is, as injustice and trauma, but on the contrary as a sign of Dutch society‟s broadmindedness and liberality. There is in fact no reason why a tourist could not take in the Anne Frank Museum by day, then hire an imported woman for degraded sex later that night. Commodifying women as sexual 24 objects is normal. One has cause to doubt that there will ever be a Museum of Sexual Slavery in Amsterdam, Berlin, or Paris. Politics and the Critique of Everyday Life Singularity can thus be fetishized. A fetish is an object into which we project our fantasies of an alien spiritual power, an external force or agent whose presence is somehow summoned or made present in the fetishized object. Singularity can be fetishistic if we somehow imagine that by attending to the past, we thereby change it. That is, in entering the contemplative space of singularity, we allow ourselves to be changed, letting the representation of trauma work its magic on us. This, we assume, is a kind of praxis, a species of moral and even political action. In fact, though, if the political, as Arendt had it, is fundamentally about distinguishing the self from others, taking action in a “space of appearances” in which all can see others and be seen by others, then the space opened up by commemoration, especially of singularity, is decidedly anti-political. The cathartic dimension of commemoration can close off, rather than invite, the kind of active engagement and selfrevelation required of political thought and deed. Memorialization and commemoration (literally, collective image-making, joining with others in holding in the mind an image of something that happened) can occlude historical reality as much as reveal it. This is especially true of singular events: first, insofar as they emphasize moral identification over political and historical explanation; second, insofar as their claim against our perceptual attention draws us away from “mere” 25 everyday violence and injustice. Singularity literally concentrates the mind by rendering trauma and violence intelligible, gathering the absolute into something that can be grasped and hence contained and transcended. But in doing so, singularity necessarily excludes vast regions of ordinary experience. As Merleau-Ponty showed in his phenomenology of perception, drawing in part on the findings of the gestalt psychologists, in order to perceive, one must distinguish between figure and background, between the specific perceptual object and the wider context in which it becomes real for us. Without a prior, invisible background, in other words, the figure itself is not intelligible. Hence the phenomenon of the gestalt switch, in which a subject viewing an ambiguous picture containing two distinct images is literally only able to see one at any given time. By focusing on the figure of the young woman in the stylish hat--to take a familiar gestalt example--I am blind to the figure of the old woman in the shawl. My mind places the latter in the background, as the horizon that makes perception of the first figure possible. Singularity too functions in this way. We are only able to focus on one thing, one great evil, because we are unconsciously placing in the background—i.e. suppressing our knowledge of--other evils and injustices which would otherwise crowd out our vision and render the field of history unintelligible. Only singularities can be seen. As Kant writes, “that is sublime in comparison with which all else is small.”35 The sublime “challenges our power...to regard as small those things of which we are wont to be solicitous (worldly goods, health, and life), and hence to regard its might” as something that cannot bow us.36 Like all perceiving beings, we tend to perceive and comprehend “events” better than 35 36 Kant, p. 97 (original emphasis). Kant, p. 111. 26 everyday phenomena, even if the latter end up being more “eventful” in terms of quantity or quality—e.g. cumulative suffering and death—than the fetish our eyes make of the Real in the event: a problem exacerbated in an era of mass telecommunications and media spectacle, where the violence of the ordinary and everyday is continually thrust into the background by the latest war, terrorist attack, or consumer novelty. I am not saying that memorialization of past trauma is not a moral and historical necessity. We have no ethical choice but to attend to past suffering, past evils--to honor and respect the memory of the dead, and to glean lessons about the nature of evil and how it develops. Nonetheless, the temporality of memorialization can be problematic in the way that it monopolized our perceptual attention. Concentrating on the past can become a liability to the present. (“Postmodern memorial culture has been marked not by amnesia or forgetting, but by an obsession with the past,” Vinebaum observes.37) In phenomenological terms, before singularity the present recedes from view, transformed into the unseen background or horizon of the past—normalcy—and so recedes in significance beside it. To the very extent that commemoration of singularity reproduces the space of the sacred, trading the diachronic for the sychronic (freezing the event in time as event), it also obscures the violence and injustice of everyday life. Faced with the blinding light of singularity, there is almost a sense in which earlier pogroms, earlier atrocities, never happened. This is the symbolic and ontological weight of the singular.38 Contemplating singularity is akin to gazing into the the sun: all other celestial and 37 Lisa Vinebaum, “Holocaust Representation from History to Postmemory,” anaxgoras.concordia.ca/vinebaum.pdf (accessed Nov. 2006), p. 15. 38 Note that the strength of a given representation of singularity would seem to depend upon its ability to sustain itself as a narrative of irreducibility. This is why there is no “Museum of the Human Atrocity,” in which the striking similarities between, e.g., the Rwandan genocide, the liquidation of the Armenians, and the mass slaughter of animals for human consumption and use would be illustrated. 27 earthly objects recede into an obscure distance, are dimmed to the point of forgetting. However, if present injustices recede, the future fares even worse: obsession with the past obscures the utopian, the Not-Yet-There of universal emancipation and justice. Singularity by definition thus stands out as an anomaly—as that which demands explanation. But this standing-out is possible only because quotidian violence and injustice have first been thrust into the background, hidden from view. “Normal” violence is submerged in a placid, undifferentiated background which then becomes the perceptual context in which the “figure” of the singular can assume its shape as a specter of horror. To give a more immediate example: periodically, the US and European mass media will create a spectacle around the murder of a middle class white woman or girl-e.g. Scott Peterson‟s murder of his pregnant wife, or the sexual assault and murder of Jon Benet Ramsey—and so draw the public into a frenzy of passion and cathexis. Yet the narrative structure of the “singular” act of male violence, by focusing attention on a particular figure, works by obscuring the whole. Mass killings and serial killings capture the public imagination in the same way. Thus the shootings of a dozen young Amish girls at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, this year: the “singular” nature of the murders, concentrated in one place and at the same time, briefly concentrated too the minds of the public. In both cases, however, the spectacle of individual and mass killings of females by males, Americans remain entirely unaware of (and disinterested in) the fact that male violence against women is a social epidemic that takes the lives of thousands of women in the US every year. Typically, when a man murders a woman, this is not “news.” It is normal, part of our ordinary, everyday common sense of the world. Only when equipped with a feminist paradigm able to render male violence intelligible as a whole can the 28 particular phenomenon—“man kills woman”—be seen in its full ontological and sociological dimensions. Charles W. Mills, in his remarks on ideal theory, has suggested that philosophers and political theorists err in their quest for an ideal theory that abstracts so far from experience and real life that it is able to account for any and all situations.39 By focusing on the ideal, trading immanence for transcendence, we risk losing sight of the particular, the real. This works to the advantage of the powerful. The status quo is preserved so long as theory ignores actual conditions and skirts the question of how those conditions—prevalent injustice, suffering, oppression—are to be transformed. In a direct sense, singularity is idealized evil. We hold it as something instructive, exemplary, as an event whose uniqueness is able to reveal something about ourselves or about society, something we didn‟t know, or thought we didn‟t know. But so extraordinary is this transcendent form of evil that everyday injustice pales in comparison. That about which we can no longer do anything at all comes to assume greater importance and significance than the injustices unfolding all around us, that we moreover blindly participate in ourselves. In his analysis of the ways in which some forms of modernist aesthetics leads to a forgetting or obliteration of what he called “everyday life,” Henri Lefebvre observed: “Under cover of the sublime and the superhuman, all manner of dehumanization is...smuggled in.”40 Lefebvre observed a tendency in modern aesthetics, beginning with the Symbolist poetry of Baudelaire in the 19th C. and reaching its fruition in the 39 Charles W. Mills, “„Ideal Theory‟ as Ideology,” Hypatia, Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 2005, pp. 165-184. 40 Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. by John Moore (London: Verso 1991), p. 123. 29 intellectual games of Andre Breton and other Surrealists in the 20th, to aestheticize and thereby mutilate everyday life by fetishizing the “marvelous.” Today, “art and philosophy...have drawn closer to everyday life, but only to discredit it.”41 By taking “ordinary” events and rendering them extraordinary—that is, by “artificially deforming things so that they become both reassuring and surprising” —exaggerated forms of modernism like Surrealism in essence degrade and obliterate the everyday.42 At the same time, the “mysterious” is “turned...into something everyday, at one and the same time familiar yet surprising.”43 On the one hand, by in a sense drawing out into the open the hidden nature of things—the power that infuses and animates quotidian culture and social life—the aesthetic of the marvelous has a critical dimension.44 At the same time, it is “equivocal”: it lets its quarry escape. By rendering the ordinary marvelous, and at the same time by making the bizarre and strange commonplace, the modernist aesthetic ends up obscuring existing social fact. “Modern concepts are like a kind of electrical supercharge to the brain...[the individual‟s] nerves and senses are frequently shortcircuited.”45 Spiritual malaise is the result—“a feeling of unease and dissatisfaction which can only be assuaged by something strange, bizarre or extraordinary.”46 Guy Debord pursued a similar train of thought in Society of the Spectacle. Consumer capitalism sets in motion more and more elaborate and exaggerated simulations of the real, of experience. The subject‟s lifeworld comes to consist entirely of second-order appearances, marvelous spectacles. Indeed, the singularity of the 41 42 Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, p. 130. Ibid, p. 119. 43 Ibid, p. 118. 44 Ibid, p. 119. 45 Ibid, p. 120. 46 Ibid, p. 121. 30 Holocaust has more and more been reduced to consumer spectacle, an opportunity for apolitical and ahistorical catharsis—exemplified in such films as Life Is Beautiful and Schindler’s List, the latter a film which reduces the extermination of the Jews to a “heroic” battle between two gentiles (Schindler, who saved many Jews, and the deranged commandant of a Nazi slave labor camp), engages in its own lurid forms of sexual sadism, and turns the Jews themselves into a strangely undifferentiated mass (a impressionist hodge podge of rituals and stereotypical “types”). But singularity was destined to go this route under conditions of compulsory consumer capitalism, becoming in effect an extension of the society of the spectacle. Even the most intelligent, wellintentioned, and critically designed memorializations—e.g. the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, or the Anne Frank Museum—cannot but interpellate us to some extent as witnesses to history, hence as spectators. In his critique of reactionary uses of the Jewish Holocaust, Norman Finkelstein (himself the children of survivors) observes that while “dissenting intellectuals [once] deployed robust political categories such as „power,‟ „interests‟...and „ideology,‟” academics discussing the Holocaust today are more likely to deploy “the bland, depoliticized language of „concerns‟ and „memory.‟”47 Dominick LaCapra, while acknowledging the continuing existential and psychological importance of preserving and returning to memories of trauma, similarly notes that today‟s “preoccupation with memory” in the field of Holocaust studies “may indicate a failure of constructive will and 47 Normal Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), p. 5. 31 divert attention from the needs of the present and the necessity of attempting to reshape the future.”48 As Charles Maier (whom LaCapra quotes) puts it: “The surfeit of memory is a sign not of historical confidence but of a retreat from transformative politics. It testifies to the loss of a future orientation, of progress toward civic enfranchisement and growing equality.”49 Both Maier and Finkelstein suggest that representation of the Holocaust has not been ideologically neutral, but has been used systematically to shore up a domestic US consensus in favor of the Israeli state and even American nationalism.50 LaCapra, however, takes issue with Maier‟s suggestion that re-memorializing historical trauma might ever be excessive. What he has in mind is attention to memory not as fetishization or catharsis, but (as LaCapra puts it), “memory requiring the kind of memory-work Freud related to working through the past”: i.e., memory not as something solely “in the past,” but “in the present and future tenses.”51 Commenting on Albert Camus‟s turn toward the theme of the Holocaust in The Fall, which he finds served “to displace or even obscure the problem of the Algerian war and [Camus‟s] response to it,” LaCapra concludes that historical concern for such traumas as the Holocaust or the Vichy experience in France, “however belated, inevitable, or desirable they may be, should be manifested without 48 49 LaCapra, p. 8. Charles Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History & Memory 5 (1993), p. 150; quoted in LaCapra, 15. 50 Thus, a published book accompanying the US Holocaust Memorial Museum states that museum officials “„see in [the Shoah‟s] perpetration a violation of every essential American value‟” (cited by Finkelstein, p. 73). 51 LaCapra, p. 16. 32 functioning as a diversionary screen to obscure or split off the need to come to terms with more recent and pressing problems....”52 It is an open question how often, though, the Holocaust is represented this way, at least not in the more popular and public manifestations of its memorialization. Typically, in part out of reverence to the sacralized space of commemoration, in part out of deference to power—e.g. the monied interests who provided the investment capital, or the prickly sensibilities of a nation unwilling to come to terms with its past atrocities-representations of mass atrocities focus on the singular nature of the event as event, i.e. at the expense of richer historical, political, and sociological analysis. It is striking how often apolitical representations of singularity are, or rather, strive to be. Thus the reassurance provided by the designer of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that the Museum “„tries meticulously to refrain from any attempt at indoctrination...from any manipulation of impressions or emotions.‟”53 On the one hand, such attempts, essentially to strip singularity of its contentious nature, that is to sidestep the problem of politics and political antagonism, have their admirable side, insofar as they correspond to a wish to avoid reductionism and appropriation by one interest against others. On the other hand, such attempts exchange in practice must always fail, both because singularities are political events, and because those who would “objectively” represent them are themselves political animals. Thus in the case of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Museum‟s directors resisted the idea of representing the 52 Ibid, pp. 89, 94. 53 Quoted in Finkelstein, p. 73. 33 experiences of Roma and Gypsies. Reportedly, the Museum‟s executive director “doubted whether Gypsies even „existed‟ as a people....”54 It is typically seen as crucial, in fact, that the commemoration of historical trauma not be “corrupted” by politics. This is partly out of deference to the fact that we human beings cannot agree on anything—certainly not politics—so that to offer a single historical interpretation of singularity would be to impose a certain violence on it and to invite just the sort of rancor and acrimony that, one supposes, led to the trauma in the first place. However, is not only univocal or one-sided interpretations that must be shunned, but all attempts at explanation whatsoever. This is why, for example, the Hiroshima Museum is not a museum that causes discomfort to Japanese by e.g. emphasizing the historical origins of the war and, hence, of Japanese complicity in militarism, patriarchal violence, and its own wartime atrocities. (Nor does the Museum engage the increasingly militaristic politics of contemporary Japan.) What is avoided at the Hiroshima Museum is both reflection on war and atrocity as such, and on war and atrocity as a specifically Japanese product. American chauvinists insist that the Japanese were responsible for the atomic bombings, because they started the war. Such an account of course is intended to excuse Americans or their state of the intentional mass murder of hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians. Nonetheless, it has its grain of truth. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ripped from historical context and subsequently fetishized as unique, almost inexplicable events. Just as there is no attempt at the museum to account for anti-Japanese racism in the US, which provided the all important psycho-social context for the decision to bomb, 54 Ibid, p. 76. 34 there is no sense in which the fatalism and collective death-drive of Japanese militarism led the nation on a path into hell. But the problem lies on both sides of the Pacific. In the US, in 1995, the Smithsonian Museum cancelled its plans to include revisionist historical interpretations of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the fiftieth anniversary of those bombings. Critics rightly charged that the omissions—the suppression of government documents which cast doubt on the political rationale and military necessity of the atomic bombings—amounted to state censorship.55 The exclusion of the overtly political from the space of contemplation and memorialization is not accidental, but on the contrary the very condition of commemoration Overt politics is considered profane, a violation of the sacred and eternal space of mass suffering, inhumanity, and death. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the literature on the Jewish Holocaust, and the literature on fascism and Nazism, “have little in common” and “have been mostly kept in separate scholarly and popular compartments inhabited by different theories, different data, different methods.”56 This is not to say that such representations and experiences therefore are not political in other ways—that they are not manipulated to fit a certain political vision of the world (liberal), or that they are not themselves often used in political ways. Conservative Zionist Jews, for example, have long employed the Holocaust as a discourse to justify a hypermilitarist, masculinist Israeli state, systematic oppression of a subaltern people--the Palestinians--and imperial expansion. The ecumenicalism of many public representations 55 See Bird and Lifshulz. Also Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1995). 56 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. ix. 35 of singularity, their supposed refusal to engage in the political, is thus often used to cover over a subrosa politics. Conclusion Singularity speaks to our need for connection, for overcoming the breach between past and present, self and other, hence too the sacred and the profane. There is something morally courageous and necessary about this insistence on the singular, irreducibly unique nature of holocaust. By insisting on looking at and remembering this, memorialization ensures that neither the evil nor the suffering of the event will be obliterated. Attending to the vast suffering involved in historical singularity is a moral and, so to say, human responsibility. We have a responsibility, as a “species being” (to borrow Marx‟s term), to bear witness to acts that implicate not merely a part of the human race, this or that individual or even nation state, but humanity as such. At the same time--and here a tension arises--we also have a responsibility to attend to the irreducible specificity of brutality, suffering, and death. By this I mean not only the specific historical details, social causes, political outcomes, and so on, of singularity, but also the specific individual victims involved--the brutality of specific acts done to specific people. Not to attend to the experiences of the individuals crushed by singularity would in a way be a further sign of our bad faith as a species, of our unwillingness to take responsibility for the evil humans do. 36 At the same time, however, or so I have argued here, the spectatorial nature of such representations of trauma are never innocent, either of the banality of commercial culture or of the force of aesthetic considerations. We need to attend more closely to the unexamined element of the sublime in our experience of singularity. Perhaps “pleasure” is too strong a term to describe our use of representations of holocaust. Perhaps, though, like Kant, we can speak frankly of the satisfaction of a terror viewed at distance. My account of singularity raises any number of questions, none of which I have answered here. First, how do we honor the memory of those who suffered and died at the hands of a great evil—the existential and moral significance—without also obscuring the social and political origins of that evil? Second, how can we memorialize atrocity and holocaust without reducing evil to its “ideal” and “sublime” case? Without, in a word, aestheticizing trauma and, in effect, getting ourselves off the hook? Third, how do we simultaneously hold on to the existential and the political? That is, how can we acknowledge and honor memories of wide-scale suffering existentially—that is, by entering a contemplative space in which we linger on the what the event means for “the human condition” or “humanity as such”-- while at the same time acknowledge our responsibility to suffering in the present—the violence and injustice of everyday life? As I have suggested in this essay, we must be continually vigilant to the ways in which narrative and discourse, in particular, can structure our perception to filter out forms of evil that we ourselves are complicit in. What we need to worry about is the way that highlighting one thing, one phenomenon, leads to the occlusion of something else. As both Merleau-Ponty and Kuhn showed (both drawing on gestalt theory), perception is always an act of discrimination, selection. We must therefore always ask, when we find 37 ourselves focusing our perception on a particular figure, what we are unconsciously shoving into the background. Might focusing on the Jewish Holocaust subtly inure us to the holocausts unfolding in our own present? Darfur, infant mortality in the Third World, the atrocities being committed on factory farms and in scientific laboratories? What is the significance of the fact that dozens of memorials exist for the victims of various holocausts, but none for the eleven million children who die excruciating deaths from perfectly preventable illnesses each year--sacrificed on the alter of global capitalism and free trade? Where is the Museum of the Murdered Animal? I mention here our systematic mass killing of other animals here, at the end and almost in passing, because it is perhaps the single most egregious example of what I have been trying to speak to here—viz., the displacement of ordinary and everyday evil in our fetish of the singular. The possibility that our treatment of other animals is not merely a holocaust, but is in many ways the holocaust—the most extensive and intensive evil ever perpetuated by humankind or a portion of it—has been the subject of recent speculation by various philosophers, activists, and social critics.57 The idea is also seriously entertained by Elizabeth Costello, the fictional protagonist of J.M. Coetzee‟s novels Animal Lives and Elizabeth Costello. In the novels, Costello, a curmudgeonly English professor, gives a series of lectures that explicitly make the analogy between our treatment of other animals and the Nazi extermination of the Jews. But the main thrust of this argument is epistemological rather than political or even moral. The challenge that Costello throws down to her skeptical academic audience (and which presumably 57 Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (Lantern Press, 2002). Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” in P. Atterton and M. Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 112-128. 38 Coetzee throws down before us, his reader), is to imagine for a moment that what we take to be the everyday is in fact murder. Costello says at one point in the novel: I was taken on a drive around Waltham this morning. It seems a pleasant enough town. I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here....They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them. Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life....is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been...to ask the dead ot Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.58 The violence that we human beings regularly inflict, with what we imagine to be complete moral impugnity and natural right, on the minds and bodies of other animals, is 58 J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 21-22 39 a holocaust that is not only invisible, but one that many of us actively celebrate and affirm every time we sit down to the dinner table. If, however, as Coetzee and others suggest, the problem of evil, especially evil in its “singular” manifestations, turns out to be intertwined with the quotidian—if singularity is in fact an exemplar of the ordinary-then the existential stakes are even greater than we imagined. The ordinary or banal is not merely, pace Arendt and Baumann, on the road to holocaust, it is holocaust. In such a context, the production of thought, of human culture itself, cannot be anything other than the continuous production of forgetting, of lies and epistemological oblivion. As Derrida wrote in a late essay, in which he compared our treatment of other animals to a perpetuum mobile of holocaust: “No one can deny seriously...that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides...).59 What I have been interested in in this paper is the way that evil is contained, papered over, and otherwise segregated from the quotidian in such a way that evil is able to persist and thrive. In raising these issues, my intention is not merely to get us to rethink commemorative practices of singularities (vast historical traumas), but also to consider the ways in which we ourselves collude more or less continually in practices of evil, and the ways in which the practices, habits of thought, etc. of ordinary life collude to form the horizon of evil, the backdrop against which so-called singularities suddenly and inexplicably “appear.” It is ordinary life that undoubtedly both encourages thoughtless indifference to suffering and injustice and indeed manifests our sadomasochistic pleasure in causing others to suffer. Perhaps we have a moral responsibility 59 Derrida, pp. 119-120. 40 to attend the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and similar exhibits. But if we want truly to comprehend the meaning of holocaust, the unspeakable suffering of it; if we furthermore desire to bear witness to extreme violence in such a way that we might actually begin to challenge it, to alter existing social reality--rather than merely to aestheticize it--then paying a visit to our own neighborhood slaughterhouse might be the more logical, and morally urgent, place to start.