Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation 9780755603879, 9780755605590

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1 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Cremation at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 2 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Cremation at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 3 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Women being driven towards the gas chamber at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 4 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Women being driven towards the gas chamber at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the many people who have contributed their time and insight during the writing of this book. For first encouraging me to undertake this project, and for her continuing support and understanding at crucial times during its writing, I am tremendously indebted to Carol Blower. Much is owed to friends and colleagues from my time at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds for the stimulating intellectual environment they created there. I am therefore thankful to the following for their encouragement and guidance at different times during the early stages of the planning and writing of this book: Dana Arnold, Rowan Bailey, Paul Bowman, Diana Douglas, Barbara Engh, Frank Felsenstein, D. Ferrett, David Fox, Michelle Gewurtz, Tony Hughes, Kurt Hirtler, David Jackson, Vivien Jones, Peter Kilroy, Katrin Kivimaa, Karima Laachmir, Sophie Mathieson, Martin McQuillan, Peter Nix, Josine Opmeer, Fred Orton, Will Rea, Adrian Rifkin, Alistair Rider, Alison Rowley, Marquard Smith, Marcel Swiboda, Lynn Turner, Liz Watkins, and Ika Willis. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of Reading for their support: Paul Davies, Simon Lee, Eckart Marchand, Nicky Ransom, Clare Robertson, Sharyn SullivanTailyour, and Tim Wilson. The Courtauld Writing Art History seminar group, admirably organized by Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin, was a valuable source of inspiration in the final stages of the writing of this book. I want to acknowledge the Elisabeth Barker and the British Academy for awarding me a Small Research Grant in 2009 to support a visit to the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to examine the Scrolls of Auschwitz. My thanks go to Wojciech Płosa of the State Museum for his helpfulness during this visit. The grant also funded a day workshop on the Scrolls. I am grateful to all the participants in that event for their insights and encouragement: Suzannah Biernoff, Bryan Cheyette, Maria Coelho, Eva Hoffman, Anne Karpf, Griselda Pollock, Sue Vice, and Roy Wolfe. I am also

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greatly indebted to Dominic Williams for his invaluable advice and skills of translation in relation to the chapter on the Scrolls included in this book. Finally, I am profoundly thankful to Jacqueline Rose for first encouraging me to pursue my research into the writings of the Sonderkommando. I would like to express my gratitude to Cecile Rault, Matthew Brown, Sara Chare, Jen Haddington and Anna Johnson, for their help in preparing this manuscript for publication. I am also obliged to Philippa Brewster for her tireless enthusiasm for this book and for her patience guiding it into print and thanks too to the two readers for I.B.Tauris for their insightful, challenging and productive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. It remains to share my deepest sources of gratitude. For her enduring support and continuing intellectual inspiration, I warmly thank Griselda Pollock. For their unstinting belief, care and generosity, I lovingly thank my parents, my sister and, overall, Ange.

SERIES PREFACE

NEW ENCOUNTERS Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock

How do we think about visual art these days? What is happening to art history? Is visual culture taking its place? What is the status of Cultural Studies, in itself or in relation to its possible neighbours art, art history, and visual studies? What is going on? What are the new directions? To what should be remain loyal? New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts proposes some possible ways of thinking through these questions. Firstly, the series introduces and works with the concept of the transdisciplinary initiative. This is not a synonym for the interdisciplinary combination that has become de rigueur. It is related to a second concept: research as encounter. Together transdisciplinary and encounter mark the interaction between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts and humanities that retain distinctive features associated with disciplinary practices and objects: art, history, culture, practice, and the new knowledge that is produced when these different ways of doing and thinking encounter each other across, and this is the third intervention, concepts, circulating between different intellectual or aesthetic cultures, inflecting them, finding common questions in distinctively articulated practices. The aim is to place these different practices in productive relation to each other mediated by the circulation of concepts. We stand at several cross-roads at the moment in relation to the visual arts and cultures, historical, and contemporary, and to theories and methods of

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analysis. Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) is offered as one experiment in thinking about how to maintain the momentum of the momentous intellectual cultural revolution in the arts and humanities that characterized the last quarter of the twentieth century while adjusting to the different field of analysis created by it. In the 1970s–90s, the necessity, or the intrusion, according to your position, was Theory: a mythic concept with a capital T that homogenized vastly different undertakings. Over those decades, research in the arts and humanities was undoubtedly reconfigured by the engagement with structuralist and poststructuralist theories of the sign, the social, the text, the letter, the image, the subject, the post-colonial, and above all, difference. Old disciplines were deeply challenged and new interdisciplines – called studies – emerged to contest the academic field of knowledge production. These changes were wrought through specific engagements with Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and discourse theory. Texts and authors were branded according to their theoretical engagements. Such mapping produced divisions between the proliferating theoretical models (could one be a Marxist, and feminist, and use psychoanalysis?). A deeper split, however, emerged between those who, in general, were theoretically oriented, and those who apparently did without theory: a position that the theoretically-minded easily critiqued because being atheoretical is, of course, a theoretical position, just one that did not carry a novel identity associated with the intellectual shifts of the post-1968 university. The impact of ‘the theoretical turn’ has been creative; it has radically reshaped work in the arts and humanities in terms of what is studied (content, topics, groups, questions) and also how it is studied (theories and methods). Yet some scholars currently argue that work done under such overt theoretical rubrics now appears tired; theory constrains the creativity of the new generation of scholars familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the legacies of the preceding intellectual revolution that can too easily be reduced to Theory 101 slogans (the author is dead, the gaze is male, the subject is split, there is nothing but text, etc.). The enormity of the initial struggles – the paradigm shifting – to be able to speak of sexual difference, subjectivity, the image, representation, sexuality, power, the gaze, postcoloniality, textuality, difference, fades before a new phase of normalisation in which every student seems to bandy around terms that were once, and in fact, still are, challengingly difficult and provocative. Theory, of course, just means thinking about things, puzzling over what is going on, reflecting on the process of that puzzling and thinking. A reactive turn away from active engagement with theoretical developments in the

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arts and humanities is increasingly evident. It is, however, dangerous and misleading to talk of a post-theory moment, as if we can relax after so much intellectual gymnastics and once again become academic couch-potatoes. The job of thinking critically is even more urgent as the issues we confront are so complex, and we now have extended means of analysis that make us appreciate even more the complexity of language, subjectivity, symbolic practices, affects and aesthetics. So how to continue the creative and critical enterprise fostered by the theoretical turn of the late twentieth century beyond the initial engagement determined by specific theoretical paradigms? How does it translate into a practice of analysis that can be constantly productive? This series argues that we can go forward, with and beyond, by transdisciplinary encounters with and through concepts. In her book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Mieke Bal argues that concepts are formed within specific theoretical projects but travel across disciplines.1 Concepts can move out of – travel from – their own originating site to become tools for thinking in the larger domain of cultural analysis their interplay produces, a domain that seeks to create a space of encounter between the many distinctive and even still disciplinary practices that constitute the arts and humanities: the fields of thought that puzzle over what we are and what it is that we do, think, feel, say, understand and live. This series, New Encounters, therefore, takes up the idea of ‘travelling concepts’ from the work of Mieke Bal, the leading feminist narratologist and semiotician, who launched an inclusive, interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis in the 1990s with The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis and The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation.2 In founding the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), Bal turned the focus from our accumulating theoretical resources to the work – the practice of interpretation – we do on cultural practices, informed not only by major bodies of theory (that we still need to study and extend), but by the concepts generated within those theories that now travel across disciplines, creating an extended field of contemporary cultural thinking. Cultural analysis is theoretically informed, critically situated, ethically oriented to ‘cultural memory in the present’.3 Cultural analysis works with ‘travelling concepts’ to produce new readings of images, texts, objects, buildings, practices, gestures, actions. In 2001, Griselda Pollock, Barbara Engh and Eva Frojmovic founded the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, with initial funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to undertake a transdisciplinary initiative to bring together and advance research in and between distinct but inter-relating areas of fine art,

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histories of art and cultural studies: three areas that seem close and yet can be divided from each other through their distinguishing commitments to practice, history and theory respectively. Founded at a moment of emerging visual studies/visual culture contesting its field of studies with art history or inventing a new one, a moment of intense questioning about what constitutes the historical analysis of art/aesthetic practices because of the new emphasis on the contemporary that seems to eclipse historical consciousness, a moment of puzzling over the nature of research through art practice, and a moment of reassessing the status of the now institutionalized, once new kid on the block, Cultural Studies, CentreCATH responded to Mieke Bal’s ASCA with its own exploration of the relations between history, practice and theory through a exploration of transdisciplinary cultural analysis that also took its inspiration from the new appreciations of the unfinished project of Kulturwissenschaft proposed by Aby Warburg at the beginning of the twentieth century. Choosing five themes that are at the same time concepts: hospitality and social alienation, musicality/aurality/textuality, architecture of philosophy/ philosophy of architecture, indexicality and virtuality, memory/amnesia/ history, CentreCATH initiated a series of encounters (salons, seminars, conferences, events) between artists, art historians, musicologists, musicians, architects, writers, performers, psychoanalysts, philosophers, sociologists and cultural theorists. Each encounter was also required to explore a range of differences: feminist, Jewish, postcolonial, ethnic, sexual, politico-geographical, historical. (For the archive see www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/ahrc/index.html) Each book in this new series is the outcome of that research laboratory, exploring the creative possibilities of such a transdisciplinary forum. This is not proposing a new interdisciplinary entity. The transdisciplinary means that each author or artist enters the forum with and from a specific set of practices, resources and objectives whose own rigours provide the necessary basis for a particular practice of making or analysis. While each writer attends to a different archive: photography, literature, exhibitions, manuscripts, images, bodies, trauma, and so forth, they share a set of concerns that defy disciplinary definition: concerns with the production of meaning, with the production of subjectivities in relation to meanings, narratives, situations, with the questions of power and resistance. The form of the books in this series is itself a demonstration of such a transdisciplinary intellectual community at work. The reader becomes the locus of the weaving of these linked but distinctive contributions to the analysis of culture(s). The form is also a response to teaching, taken up and processed by younger scholars, a teaching that itself is a creative translation

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and explication of a massive and challenging body of later twentieth century thought, which, transformed by the encounter, enables new scholars to produce their own innovatory and powerfully engaged readings of contemporary and historical cultural practices and systems of meaning. The model offered here is a creative covenant that utterly rejects the typically Oedipal, destructive relation between old and young, old and new, while equally resisting academic adulation. An ethics of intellectual respect – Spivak’s critical intimacy is one of Bal’s useful concepts – is actively performed in engagement between generations of scholars, all concerned with the challenge of reading the complexities of culture. As already mentioned, one of CentreCATH’s key research themes was Amnesia, Historia, Memoria. Nicholas Chare’s book finds its place in this strand of investigation through its focus on the cultural inscription of the concentrationary and the genocidal: Auschwitz. Yet it also participates in another, Aurality/Musicality/Textuality, through its own transdisciplinary explorations of literature, painting, and photography in which exquisite attention is given to sound as well as to image across these practices and media. Framed by its own innovative and attentive reading of the concept of abjection (revived for contemporary cultural analysis by psychoanalyst and literary theorist, Julia Kristeva), Chare daringly reads the anti-Semitic writer LouisFerdinand Céline within the same book as he addresses the poetic writings of Paul Celan, one of the most highly regarded poets defying and confirming Adorno’s anxieties about the possibility of any ‘poetry after Auschwitz’, and the semiotically innovative writings of Charlotte Delbo, a French political deportee to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps, whose writings, Auschwitz and After have only belatedly entered into Anglophone studies of survivorship, witness and testimony. Crossing these difficult, yet legible, affinities; Chare reads Celan’s poetics in relation to Francis Bacon’s paintings in order to breach disciplinary divisions through the concept of sound. If Celan and Delbo deal with writing and memory, Delbo also introduces the body and its marked surfaces, inscribed with inky numbers that are inserted subcutaneously. Abjection is all about the fragile borderlines within which subjectivity holds or fails, and skin is one of those psychoanalysis has linked to the ways we imagine bodily as well as psychic integrity. Chare’s book then moves into the spaces of extremity taking us to those ‘remnants of Auschwitz’ that stand in the closest proximity to events that could hardly be witnessed: the four precious photographs taken daringly, in secret, by a member of one Sonderkommando servicing the Auschwitz gas chambers in order to provide the only direct evidence of the killing machine, and the Auschwitz Scrolls, fragmentary texts written by several doomed Sonderkommando prisoners in

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this, the most dreadful core of the exterminatory universe, texts that were buried and have slowly surfaced, marked by their long interral in the contaminated earth. Here Chare’s startling originality as a cultural theorist, art historian, literary critic and, above all, writer comes most into focus as he calls upon us to attend to the materiality of the artefact itself that witnesses the unthinkable events the prisoner-authors have sought to press into history through inscriptions on fragile surfaces that they hope will survive when they know their bodies will, like those they handled daily in this factory of corpses, be ‘disappeared’ by gas and fire, into the air: this phrase recalling the repeating line in Celan’s most famous poem: Death Fugue where he speaks of their fate: ‘a grave in the air.’ Nicholas Chare’s book makes a significant contribution to the now extensive field of studies of memory, witness and testimony. His unique intellectual formation in literature, art history and cultural studies has produced his own distinctive ‘voice’ in the field that is now emerging of art writing: as historically rigorous as art history demands, it is also acutely aware of the relations between writing itself as a practice and that about which writing writes. Writing becomes its own form of witnessing to the historical material and the materiality of history, hence the exquisite rapport between the themes of history, memory and forgetting on the one hand, and sound, subjectivity, and textuality on the other. Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds 2011

PREFACE

To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the prelanguage of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that prelanguage and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself. Elaine Scarry1 At the heart of this book is an attempt to rethink the frequently maligned concept of abjection in relation to acts of bearing witness to the Holocaust. I first encountered Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection in the mid-1990s whilst researching the art of Mona Hatoum.2 The concept was then used by many as convenient shorthand for explaining any artwork or literary text with visceral pretensions. The interview with Kristeva by Charles Penwarden, ‘Of Word and Flesh’, included in the 1995 Tate Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century exhibition catalogue which features works by Hatoum, did little to dispel this kind of association: the abject equalling porous, putrid bodies. It was, however, in this interview that Kristeva clearly outlined avant-garde art’s role as a form of catharsis for social malaise, for the cultural anxiety in the face of abjection which has accompanied the collapse of political and religious ideals. This purgation of abjection is carried out by way of a particular kind of language, carnal in nature, which operates at ‘the frontier of subject and object, of word and flesh’.3 The significance of this formulation in relation to the issue of Holocaust testimony only occurred to me much later although I gained an early sense of how productive Kristeva’s theorization of the relationship between the triad of psyche, soma and signification could be. The introduction to this book is an attempt to articulate this relationship, particularly as it pertains to the

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psychic experience of abjection, through providing an overview of Kristeva’s conception of language as a potential vehicle for expressing and discharging negative impulses. It provides a corrective to existing readings which have tended to take Kristeva’s ideas out of context and banalize them to a degree which loses sight of the architecture of her argument in its larger framing of the movement from the anthropological to contemporary literary theory. The idea of bringing Kristeva’s ideas about abjection into dialogue with works of Holocaust testimony will strike some readers as perverse given the pivotal role the fascist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline plays in her book on abjection, Powers of Horror. I ask these readers not to pass judgement until they have reached the final pages of this book, by which time I hope they will realize how constructive such a dialogue promises to be for the theorization of testimonies to extreme experiences. The relevance of Céline for Kristeva’s project, however, cannot reasonably be ignored despite many scholars who choose to do just that. It is common to read work on abjection that builds an understanding of the concept from the opening chapters of Powers of Horror disregarding entirely those sections devoted exclusively to Céline’s writing. The first chapter of my book provides a necessary counterbalance to such approaches, situating abjection firmly in relation to Céline’s literary creations. It argues that Céline writes towards the abject whilst simultaneously writing out his destructive impulses. This chapter is followed by a study of the art of the British painter Francis Bacon. Bacon and Céline, in their different ways, attest to the allure fascism held for artistic and literary modernism. Céline’s abhorrent political sympathies are not in doubt although it is open to debate whether Bacon’s erotic reflexes, his seduction by Nazi imagery, betray a similar political complicity.4 What is certain is that both writer and painter purge the abject through producing works that sound the depths of horror that underlie the self while their texts both refuse to plunge into it. The subsequent chapters of the book examine how the concept of abjection is invaluable for furthering our understanding of the psychic processes that inform the production of specific examples of Holocaust testimony and of our reception of them. These examples include the poetry of the Romanian born poet Paul Celan; the poetic-prose of the French resistance fighter who was interned in Auschwitz and then Ravensbrück, Charlotte Delbo; and two forms of testimony, literary and photographic, created by members of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau. The Sonderkommando were the specially selected prisoners forced to work at the very heart of the genocide, the manufacture of death. In this context, the hinge-like quality of Kristeva’s conception of language, braiding as it does the drives, the semiotic, with the symbolic, is of immeasurable significance.

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Language, for Kristeva, permits the body to be spoken in thought. It was this element of Powers of Horror which, given the way the concentration camps reduced the self to an almost unthinking corporeality, to an abject body, came to appear so vital to me. Kristeva’s theorization of abjection as psychic process permits us to understand the assault on the self that occurred in the camps and also, crucially, how something of that assault can be caught in visual and textual accounts of the Holocaust experience. My book therefore takes the issue of testimony away from the debates about authenticity. It moves instead into the question of the materiality and semiotics of modes of bearing witness, which is very much what the writings of Celan and Delbo specifically bring to the fore. The third chapter therefore examines how the poetry of Celan communicates the psychic experience of being reduced to a state of abjection. Celan was never at Auschwitz (he was interned in a series of deadly forced labour camps in Romania during the war) but his verses attest to the disintegration of self that accompanied life in such camps. He writes, as it were, from within abjection. The fourth chapter comprises an analysis of what are commonly referred to as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, writings produced from within the death-camp at Birkenau by members of the Sonderkommando that were buried in the ground in the desperate hope that this primary witnessing to the death process might one day be disinterred. In a different way these works can also be understood as having been produced from inside abjection. The fifth chapter, on Delbo’s works, describes a writer who has experienced the becoming abject that characterized life in concentration camps but who uses literature as a means to write back from that experience, to regain a sense of self. It argues that Delbo’s works offer glimpses of the abject but refuse to be overwhelmed by it. The final chapter suggests that the four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau can be seen to provide a visual correlative to Delbo’s writings. These chapters, whilst they can be read in isolation, make most sense cumulatively as arguments build and consolidate. This is not a series of essentially discrete essays collected together to form a ‘fast book’, as unfortunately occasionally occurs today in response to the pressing demands of audit culture. It is the product of ten years spent grappling with the issue of representing horror. The book can be read as in broad sympathy with works such as Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images malgré tout, which each, in their different ways, challenge the assumption that the Holocaust is ‘unsayable’.5 A key aim of this book is to demonstrate how ‘saying’ can take place. In this context, the Scrolls of Auschwitz, still severely neglected in scholarship about Holocaust testimony, probably because of the

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problematical context in which they were produced, are particularly revealing, demonstrating, as they do, a faith in the testimonial capacity of language under the most extreme conditions. The analyses provided here of the Scrolls and the photographs produced by members of the Sonderkommando adds to the small, yet now steadily growing, literature related to the lives of the inmates who worked in the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This work, however, is not solely intended as a contribution to contemporary debates about witnessing. Additionally it is a demonstration of a particular way of approaching theory and also the study of cultural artefacts. This critical reappraisal of abjection, produced from out of a close and attentive reading of Powers of Horror, aims to show how many ideas now too often taken for granted within the humanities still have currency and present ongoing challenges. Abjection, for instance, has been largely written off, along with so many other ‘keywords’, as a term that has been done, understood: incorporated. There has been a sly turn against substantial theoretical engagement. Ideas are now rapidly assimilated and ‘put to work’ yet the returns are meagre compared with sustained engagement with a specific theoretical insight. This book would not have been possible without ‘inhabiting’ Kristeva’s text over long periods of time. Too often the wish for immediate satisfaction, for instant gratification, which characterizes culture in general nowadays, has leaked into academic practice, staining its output. This is then a work that stands against the slow, yet so far sure, asphyxiation of critical thinking in the humanities and that seeks to allay the mistrust, unease, fear, within its citadel disciplines, that highly theoretically informed, transdisciplinary work, work which fosters encounters across branches of learning, will somehow weaken rather than revitalize intellectual inquiry. In this endeavour, the book is indebted to my time studying at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and, particularly, to the opportunities afforded by the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) for fostering and extending my critical thinking. It was also through my time at Leeds that the close attention in this book to the way ideas are embodied in cultural artefacts emerged. It was through the absent presence of T J Clark and the engaging company of scholars such as Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock and Adrian Rifkin that the beginnings of a realization of the necessity for theory to emerge from out of an encounter with the object of study became apparent, for heeding how theory is materialized. This close reading of the materiality of artefacts can be distinguished from the pervasive mantra in art history departments to study things ‘first hand’, which often unfortunately translates into staid exercises in formal analysis or, worse, into a perceived quasi-spiritual revelation

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of the truth of the object. The militant materiality displayed in this book is, rather, a counter to those who buy into theory’s reputation for placing cultural artefacts at a distance or rendering them opaque. The book works from the opposite assumption. It is written in the belief that it is only through theory that it is possible to be on intimate terms with an object and get to grips with some of its many complexities. A key secondary desire of this study is, therefore, to restate the critical importance of working with and through theory in order to meaningfully engage with pressing concerns of the present such as bearing witness to Auschwitz and its afterimages.

INTRODUCTION

Finding a way in language Thinking definitely means getting words to appreciate one another, means secretly fostering their encounters. Edmond Jabès1 In 1980, Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, was first published in France by Éditions du Seuil.2 It was rapidly translated into English, appearing as Powers of Horror in 1982.3 Powers remains the bestknown work by Kristeva in the Anglo-American world. It has had a profound significance across many disciplines with the concept of abjection developed in it proving useful in fields as diverse as anthropology, art history, criminology, film studies, sociology and literary studies.4 This book provides both a critical reassessment of Kristeva’s highly influential writings on the abject and an appraisal of the value held by the concept of abjection for the study of the Holocaust. Powers explores the role played by abjection in subject-formation and subsequent to it. The abject continues to occupy a significant role in psychic life after infancy. There is always the potential to lapse into a state of abjection. For Kristeva, the subject experiencing such a lapse goes through a crisis in which ‘the borders between the object and the subject cannot be maintained’.5 Abjection therefore prospectively poses a significant threat to psychic well-being. In the past religious institutions assumed the role of policing the subject’s encounters with materials likely to trigger the experience of abjection, guarding their adherent’s psychic health. One of the roles of religion was to protect the subject through regulating its encounters with the abject. The increasing secularism that has accompanied modernity means,

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however, that religion is no longer in the position to perform this regulatory function. For Kristeva, it is now avant-garde art and literature which provides the modern subject with a form of protective catharsis by articulating and working through the abject. It is useful to begin by situating Powers within the broader context of Kristeva’s work and by outlining some of the key concepts necessary for a proper understanding of her theory of the abject. The essay on abjection might be thought of as a transitional text. The interest in the philosophy of language so manifest in Revolution in Poetic Language has almost disappeared as have many of the Marxist elements of Kristeva’s earlier analyses.6 There is, instead, an increased emphasis on the psychoanalytic component of her conception of language. The work, however, still maintains a strong focus on the status of the semiotic within signification. As Kristeva elaborates in Revolution, language possesses both symbolic and semiotic aspects. Its semiotic facet is composed of the ‘rhythm, intonation, and echolalias of the mother-child symbiosis’.7 This aspect comprises of the tempos and tones reminiscent of the early involvements of mother and child. The semiotic is marked by the drives, internal pressures described by Freud as at the borderline between the psyche and the soma. Kristeva shares this view, calling the drives ‘energy charges as well as psychical marks’.8 They are formed from stimuli within the body that seek satisfaction without. These marked energies, composed of ideas and affects, act as representatives of bodily pressures within the psychic apparatus. They are initially channelled by the mother and it is through her that they become discursive and socially conditioned. The symbolic aspect represents that place within the Symbolic order wherein the subject can take up a position. The symbolic, through apparatuses such as grammar and syntax, orders communication. The voice, as the material support of speech, as tone and rhythm, would be on the side of the semiotic whereas the logical arrangement of the spoken words, their syntax, rather than the way they are articulated, would be on the side of the symbolic. The two aspects constructively aggravate each other thereby animating language. The semiotic and the symbolic are not solely present in speech. They both also manifest themselves in literary texts which comprise what Kristeva calls a phenotext and a genotext. The phenotext is allied to the symbolic whilst the genotext is associated with the semiotic. The two can ‘be separated only for the purposes of exposition’.9 The phenotext is that part of the text concerned with efficient communication whilst the genotext describes the style by which that communication is carried out. In avant-garde literature stylistic innovations can often act to privilege the usually suppressed semiotic aspect

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of language. To completely do away with the symbolic aspect would, however, entail a descent into psychosis, a loss of self. The avant-garde writer flirts with such a loss. Theirs is a writing which imperils the self. The two writers Kristeva uses to illustrate the writing practices of the avant-garde and their revolutionary potential are the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé and the Comte de Lautréamont. Kristeva’s exposition of the works of these writers in Revolution has not yet been translated in its entirety. Revolution is divided into three parts, of which only the first has so far been published in full in English. As part of her analysis of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Kristeva describes how numerous passages in the poetry express a poetic subject that is divided. The subject embodies a lived dialectic. This divided subject demonstrates that ‘I’ is no longer an instance but is instead ‘a rhythmic motion, an undulating dynamic’.10 The ‘I’ never is but is always in the process of becoming. The kinetic force behind this rhythmic becoming is created by the perpetual tension that exists between the semiotic and the symbolic. The two aspects of signification function to sustain each other in a continual oscillation. This dialectic is not one wherein the terms can become reconciled through the advent of a third term. The disappearance of either term would be disastrous. As mentioned earlier, the absence of a symbolic dimension to signification would cause the subject to descend into psychosis. Equally, the removal of the dynamic semiotic element would result in stasis and totalitarianism. The semiotic and the symbolic co-exist in a productive antagonism which requires that either one or the other be privileged and ascendant at a given moment. In her analyses of Mallarmé and Lautréamont, Kristeva examines how the two poets worked in different ways to disrupt the privileged position occupied by the symbolic in language at the time. The underside to this dominant aspect of signification, the semiotic, offered the glimpse of an alternative state of things. It held a revolutionary potential. The poets worked to overturn convention, to liberate verse from culturally concretized laws of meter and prosody. Mallarmé freed the semiotic aspect of language concealed by traditional verse structure. This he achieved through the ‘scission of sense, of clause, of the word; the loss of their identity in favour of a rhythm, of a music, of a melody’.11 In the case of Mallarmé, however, this renewed sonorousness in verse, this revealed musicality, was also supplemented by a graphic dimension. As Kristeva explains, the poet’s ‘properly vocal resources are joined by graphic processes: the lines of lettering, their layout on the page, the length of the lines, the blanks etc., which go towards constructing a semiotic totality open to multiple interpretation and substituting a provisional and fragile mode of

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signification for one of thetic unity’.12 The thetic phase is one during which the child breaks with the mother and enters into the Symbolic. Mallarmé therefore works language (at both the level of its sound and its appearance) in order to cause fractures in the symbolic thereby permitting the semiotic underside to rise to the surface. The stasis at the level of meaning which the symbolic seeks to guarantee is here disrupted. It has to be emphasized again that this is not solely achieved by way of the rhythm and tone of language but also through visual means. The symbolic can be prised apart through both the vocal and the visual fields. The vast blank spaces between the words, the rise and fall in the scale of the type, its well and swell, and the jagged edges at the ends of the lines of a poem like Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (1897) act to reveal the semiotic. The verses of Un coup de dés tumble down the page, fall into the page. The page itself, the snowy pulp upon which words impress themselves, is as important to the poem as the ink that characterizes the words. The paper of any page is always the ground from which words rise up to meet the reader. In Mallarmé, however, the writing appears to lie closer to the sheet of paper, to the bed that bears the ink, to its own material underside, the surface upon which it is inscribed. The paper is allowed to assert its presence, to figure equally with the words. Words no longer rest upon it but within it. The page, now liberated, throbs and shimmers beside the words. In the poem the page is permitted its rhythm. This visual dimension to revolutionary poetics will be explored further in later chapters, particularly in relation to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s pamphlets, to the Scrolls of Auschwitz, and to the four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at crematorium V at Birkenau. The analyses of both Mallarmé and, to a lesser extent, Lautréamont, demonstrate the way language can be reinvigorated through syntactic inventions and interventions. The interference that avant-garde literature effects at the level of grammar and meter, the noise it introduces into language, contains a revolutionary potential because it opens the symbolic to a possible reappropriation on improved terms. In the works of a writer like Céline, however, as will be examined later, this reappropriation does not take place. The noise is never eliminated. Mallarmé and Lautréamont demonstrated that language was not fixed and that convention should not be mistaken for concretion. The liberation of the semiotic in their literature acts as a reminder that language is malleable, its meanings multiple. The work on these two poets is important here because it demonstrates the importance writing holds for Kristeva as a site in which subjectivity is formed and, potentially, transformed.

Introduction

5

In Powers, Kristeva controversially uses the writings of Céline to show how the abject’s power over the subject can influence creativity. Céline forms the mainstay for her argument that avant-garde literature has supplanted the sacred as the site where abjection is abreacted or discharged. In the first chapter, the accuracy of some of the highly critical responses generated by Kristeva’s decision to engage with the works of Céline will be examined through an analysis of the novelist’s anti-Semitic pamphlets. These pamphlets are brought into dialogue with contemporaneous writings by Jean-Paul Sartre. This enables the anxieties about identity which underpin them, anxieties mirrored in Sartre’s works, to be revealed and permits an exploration of issues of collaboration, intention and sexuality related to this. The chapter also considers the often neglected final third of Powers, which constitutes Kristeva’s analysis of Céline’s controversial writings. It is here that Kristeva argues that his writing manages the abject. In secular society, writing provides ‘the ultimate sublimation of the unsignifiable’.13 This unsignifiable, the abject, haunts us all. It is the no thing out of which we became, something we are intimate with yet which we cannot know, which ‘lies there, quite close’ but ‘cannot be assimilated’.14 In the absence of religion with its ‘various means of purifying the abject’,15 it is literature which acts as ‘an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge’.16 Through its capacity to expel the abject, literature shores us against our ruin. In a number of readings of Powers the importance writing has as a means by which to manifest the abject in contemporary society is neglected. These readings focus instead on the kind of physical demonstrations of abjection detailed in the book’s opening chapter. The abject is too rapidly and simply equated with piss, shit, vomit, viscera and corpses. For Kristeva, however, the abject is also crucially intimately connected with language and specifically with the language of avant-garde literature. It cannot be disputed that shit and death often feature prominently as subject-matter in the kind of abject writing that Kristeva goes on to analyse in the final third of Powers. Nor, however, can it be denied that the style of this writing is as important to her as its content. It is this attention to style which is often neglected in readings of Kristeva’s ideas about abjection. One of the aims of the first chapter is therefore to redress this disregard for the role of writing in Powers. It examines how the abject can be registered in and through the written word. In his essay ‘Julia Kristeva and her histories’, Adrian Rifkin writes of the tendency to pillage Kristeva’s texts for ‘conveniently sized “bleeding chunks” of theory, as is the fate suffered by the much-abused concept of abjection’.17 The work to come can be read as an attempt to return the spoils of Powers, the concept of abjection, to its original setting: one in which writing is of prime importance.

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The transitional nature of Powers within the history of Kristeva’s thinking has been remarked upon before. Kelly Oliver has suggested that a change can also be read from a focus on rejection in Revolution and Powers to one on identification in Tales of Love and Black Sun.18 In Tales of Love, published three years after Powers, the emphasis has shifted away from the semiotic and towards the symbolic. Powers of Horror also contains the seed of the idea of the ‘imaginary-father’ which Kristeva will go on to develop in much more detail in the later book. Powers is therefore difficult to position within the Kristevan corpus. It shares affinities with both earlier and later works. It maintains the interest in rejection which Kristeva elaborated upon in Revolution yet this interest has now shifted towards how a different kind of rejection makes identification possible. It is a work which explores how the path to the mirror-phase and the Oedipus complex is made feasible through a prior rejection of the mother. Powers seeks to account for how the entry into the Symbolic realm is made possible in the first place. Kristeva contends that prior to the mirror-phase (in which the infant identifies with an image outside of itself and begins to recognize what it lacks and what it desires and to imagine how to fulfil those desires) there must be an earlier stage in which the child ejects itself from the mother. She explains that even ‘before being “like”, “I” am not but do “separate,” “reject,” “ab-ject”’.19 For Kristeva, the child must leave the orbit of the mother before the mirror-image can begin to fascinate. The most archaic experience of abjection is therefore related to the maternal. It is the process by which provisional borders are established between the infant and the mother through the infant’s repeated attempts to expel the mother. These borders must be brought into being before the misrecognition that characterizes the mirror-phase becomes possible. The child must already have some sense of its distance and difference from the mother in order to see beyond the maternal realm of plenitude to an image outside this realm. The child’s at oneness with the mother in the Real must cease to be before the mirror-phase can occur. That which is expelled is, however, never wholly voided. The mother never abandons the subject even after their entry into the Imaginary and the Symbolic realms. The abject mother persists as a kind of constitutive outside to the subject, an outside which simultaneously acts as a guarantor and threat to the inside. When the subject encounters instances of material or moral ambiguity, when the subject encounters what is abject, a memory of the abject mother is triggered. Usually encounters with the abject are carefully regulated because it poses a threat to the subject through acting as a reminder of his or her provisional nature. The abject has the potential to undo the separation

Introduction

7

between inside and outside that the infant fought so hard to establish. For this reason, all societies have developed taboos and laws which work to police the way the abject is encountered and experienced. Much of the middle section of Powers is concerned with elaborating the psychic underpinnings of these modes of governing the subject’s interaction with the abject. Kristeva focuses particularly on the ways in which these interactions have been regulated in a Judeo-Christian context. The means by which abjection is policed alters in response to changes in religious structures. In Powers, the chapters ‘Semiotics of Biblical Abomination’ and ‘… Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi’ explore these changes. The chapter on abomination includes Kristeva’s argument that the biblical purity laws form an extension of more ancient traditions of defilement. These purity laws occur throughout the Old Testament but are given their fullest expression in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. The differentiations between the pure and the impure which are outlined in these books bear testament to nascent Judaism’s struggles with paganism and, in particular, with maternal cults. The impure is often either explicitly or implicitly aligned with the maternal. The taboo against incest forms the originating mytheme for the purity laws. This is exemplified by the exhortation in Exodus, ‘thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ (Exodus 23: 19). It is not milk as nourishment that is at issue here but rather the symbolic value of the milk in question. It is not abominable to drink milk but milk becomes abominable when it is used for seething or cooking the young goat: when it is used as part of a ‘cultural culinary fancy, which sets up an abnormal bond between mother and child’.20 The prohibition is a metaphor for incest. This metaphor is repeated in Leviticus which contains the ban on sacrificing a cow or ewe on the same day as their young: ‘And whether it be cow or ewe ye shall not kill it and her young both in one day’ (Leviticus 22: 28). Kristeva concedes that some of the biblical prohibitions appear to serve a more immediate and practical purpose such as those laws which relate to leprosy. She writes that it is certain that ‘leprosy does objectively cause serious damage in a people with a strong community life and, moreover, an often nomadic one’.21 In fact, however, the practicality of the prohibitions that surround leprosy are less certain than Kristeva believes thereby lending further support to her understanding of the purity laws as guarding against fusion with the maternal. The impurity subsequently translated as leprosy is unlikely to correspond to the contagious, flesh-eating disease of that name. In Ritual and Morality, Hyam Maccoby explains that the word lepra used in the Septuagint does not translate as leprosy. The Greek word for leprosy is actually either elephas or elephantiasis.22 Lepra refers instead to skin diseases of

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various kinds such as eczema or psoriasis, which are not usually transmissible or life-threatening. The taboo which is ostensibly against leprosy is therefore probably less practical in origin than Kristeva believes. Maccoby goes on to make clear that many diseases which are far more infectious were not included in the ritual purity system. He believes that the banishment of the so-called leper stems from his or her appearance. It was the visible breaking down of inside and outside at the level of the skin which had to be removed from sight. In her discussion of the prohibition, Kristeva also highlights the visibility of skin disease and the troublingly evident breaking down of the most basic of boundaries between inside and outside which accompanies it. Maccoby lends further support to Kristeva’s claim that the purity laws work to purge Judaism of its roots in the religions of the archaic Mother Goddess in his discussion of the rite of the Red Cow. In this ritual a red cow is sacrificed and burnt. Its ashes (once mixed with water) then provide a source of purification against the most severe form of impurity which is corpseimpurity. This purification rite manifestly mixes both purity and impurity because the participants become unclean during the preparation and performance of it. This admixture reinforces Kristeva’s contention that the pure and the impure are logically complicit. It is a complicity which she believes can be located within the Hebrew word t’bh or to’ebah, which means an abomination that is also a prohibition, a defilement that is also a law, and demonstrates the ‘economic inseparability of pure and impure in the Bible’.23 In the ritual of the Red Cow the expression which the scriptures use to designate the purifying water-cum-ashes is mei niddah, which is usually translated as ‘waters of purification’. Maccoby, however, explains that ‘the word “niddah” has been used in Leviticus with only one meaning, “menstruation”’.24 This means that ‘the Red Cow’s ashes when mixed with water are called “waters of menstruation”’.25 He reads the rite as one which bears witness to a prior age in which menstrual blood was revered for its healing and purifying power. Menstrual blood is usually defined as impure within Leviticus but recoded as water and ashes it is able to function as a substance of purification. The ceremony is ‘the last vestige in the religion of the Israelite Sky-God of the earth goddess’.26 It provides a further example of the disavowed feminine within the purity laws of Judaism. In the chapter ‘… Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi’, Kristeva shifts her analysis from Judaism to a consideration of Christian articulations of the abject. In Christianity she suggests that the threat of the abject ‘comes no longer from outside but from within’.27 This interiorizing of the abject produces a Christian subject riven by an inner division. Kristeva explains that ‘evil thus displaced into the subject, will not cease tormenting him from within,

Introduction

9

no longer as a polluting or defiling substance, but as the ineradicable repulsion of his henceforth divided and contradictory being’.28 In contrast to Judaism, where it is thrust aside, Christianity spiritualizes the abject. Impurity becomes man’s responsibility as it originates in personal conduct. The impure is ‘subordinated to judgment and dependent upon the subject’ and as such ‘assumes the status not of a substance that is cut off but of an action that is indecent’.29 The brief summary provided here of Kristeva’s social history of differing religious responses to the abject demonstrates the changing ways in which the subject has experienced abjection in the past. These are culturally and historically specific. The question that arises for Kristeva is how abjection comes to be coded in a secular world in which those religious safeguards designed to police the subject’s experience of the abject have ceased to function. The modern Western world is one in which religious institutions and structures have ceased to possess the power and relevance previously attached to them. For Kristeva, as already mentioned, it is avant-garde art and literature which now assumes the role of guarding the subject against the abject. In the present, ‘owing to the crisis in Christianity, abjection elicits more archaic responses that are culturally prior to sin; through them it again assumes its biblical status, and beyond it that of defilement in primitive societies’.30 This crisis is one precipitated by the collapse of the Other, by the symbolic death of God or the Father. In the shadow of this demise the aesthetic task becomes one of ‘a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct’ and ‘amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression’.31 Modern literature writes into the abyss of the subject. It writes towards the abject, approaching symbolic collapse, not in order to resist it but rather to unveil it. This literature provides ‘an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word’.32 Literature works to articulate the abject and thereby void it. As discussed earlier, the primary example Kristeva provides of this kind of purgative literature is the author Louis-Ferdinand Céline but she also refers to other writers including Artaud, Bataille, Baudelaire, Borges, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, Lautréamont, Proust and Sartre. It should be obvious from this list that Kristeva privileges writing as the site within which the abject is at once hypostatized and voided. The relationship that exists between abjection and writing forms a constant theme throughout what follows. The chapters each examine how traumatic experiences, often conceived of as beyond description, create states of abjection to which different media can bear witness in discrete and effective ways. The second chapter, for example, analyses how the paintings of

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Francis Bacon can be interpreted as testament to the abject. The third chapter examines the music of performance artist Diamanda Galás and the poetry of Paul Celan, whilst the fourth considers the Scrolls of Auschwitz, primarily in terms of their physical appearance, and the fifth, the poetic prose of Charlotte Delbo. The final chapter explores four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. All these chapters address works that endeavour to write the horror of the abject through the use of words or images. They employ a language, pictorial or verbal, that frequently emerges from out of the horror. For Kristeva, Céline’s writing gives us ‘the most daring X-ray of the “drive-foundations” of fascism’.33 If the powers of horror that constitute abjection are not cathected through literature or religion then they may be expelled through violence. It is these impulses which were harnessed by National Socialism. Céline writes on the cusp of these impulses as does Bacon. Galás, Celan and the authors of the Scrolls of Auschwitz, however, do not write towards the horror of the abject but from within it. Their works occupy an ‘exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’.34 The works of these authors will also be explored as embodiments rather than representations of horror. It will be argued that Delbo’s prose can be contrasted with the works examined in earlier chapters in that it represents an effort to write back from abjection, reasserting distance, and constitutes an attempt to reappropriate the symbolic aspect of language. The final chapter is, in part, a response to Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, with its worrying emphasis on the figure of the Muselmann as a privileged locus of testimony. Agamben argues that the death-in-life of the Muselmann is the sole aspect of the camps that needs to be attested to, this because if ‘the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied’.35 Through a consideration of four photographs taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 (images which were subsequently smuggled out to the Polish resistance), an alternative means of bearing witness to the ‘impossibility of speaking’ is offered. It is a bearing witness which refuses to hold the belief that limit experiences are beyond communication whilst also resisting being co-opted by existing paradigms of reception for Holocaust images. It will also be argued that the horror of these photographs is not signified but rather shows itself to the reader and spectator.

1 Execrable Speech

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was writing at a time when the torpor of signification that accompanies totalitarianism was in the ascendant. Totalitarianism introduces the telos of inertia into language, fixing meaning and staying dynamism. It is against such a political backdrop that Céline wrote towards the abject and away from symbolic stasis. He wrote in the direction of the horror Kristeva describes as forming ‘the “drive foundations” of fascism’.1 It may have been as a result of his writing towards this horror that Céline identified so strongly with the politics of fascism in his everyday life. He was writing towards the reason behind his own political failings, his own moral turpitude. His writing, however, offers an alternative to extreme politics because it demonstrates that the abject can be mastered in the aesthetic realm through ‘literary devices and writing style’.2 Totalitarian politics does not seek to purge horror but, instead, manipulates the powers of horror to its advantage. The crisis in subjectivity posed by the potential for unmediated contact with the abject causes a desire for identification with an authority figure, a personage embodying the paternal function; a Duce, a Franco, or a Führer. The dictator shores up the symbolic. Modernist art and literature was shunned by the totalitarian regime of National Socialism because it offered a potential site of catharsis from the powers of horror. The aesthetic realm evacuates the abject through elaborating it. It purges and purifies. In a perverse fashion, Céline’s writing practice posed a significant threat to the politics he endorsed because it contained the potential to render the role served by those politics in the psycho-social realm redundant. Céline’s journey towards the abject, towards the constitutive outside of the subject, is one Kristeva retraces in her own writing. Powers, in and through the dense poetry of its opening chapter, enacts a sinking into horror, a descent towards the abject. Kristeva’s prose mirrors Céline’s voyage into darkness.

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Powers represents Kristeva’s journey into the night with her subsequent work Tales of Love marking a return from that night. The latter work constitutes the reappropriation of the paternal function that Céline failed to accomplish. In Tales of Love, Kristeva postulates the existence of a non-symbolic third in the Imaginary realm, an imaginary father. The imaginary father has the status of a non-object that attracts the proto-subject. The subject-to-be identifies with the imaginary father. This identification takes place before the rejection, the abjection, of the mother. Kristeva explains that this identification with ‘the imaginary father, who is such a godsend that you have the impression that it is he who is transferred into you, withstands a process of rejection involving what may have been chaos and is about to become “abject”’.3 The mother is rejected but a connection is maintained with the figure of the imaginary father. This connection protects against the ‘emptiness of separation’.4 The imaginary father is a ‘forming presence’ that draws the infant into the imaginary exchange.5 It enables the mirror-phase to take place. In Tales of Love, Kristeva posits the existence of a third term prior to the role of the Father in the Oedipus complex. The third term embraces the infant as it loosens its bond with the mother. It acts as an antidote to the solitude that attends rejection. Céline’s writing is one that rejects without establishing the requisite connection that would ward off this emptiness. There is no tale of love in Céline’s writing only detestation and loathing. He was a hate-filled writer who, through his anti-Semitic pamphlets, was committed to exposing the Jews for the villains he perceived them to be. Kristeva’s reading of these pamphlets, which were ostensibly produced to save France, forms the primary topic of this chapter. In the pamphlets, Céline tried to mask this hatred behind morality: he was doing the ‘right thing’ by writing them. The modern reader usually sees through Céline’s dissembling (as indeed did many of his contemporaries) to the inexcusable and irrational hatred that underlies the pamphlets, physically recoiling at their content. The subject-matter is often extreme: Racially the Jews are monsters, flawed half-breeds, a plague that needs to disappear. All that they peddle and scheme is cursed. In terms of human breeding they are, all kidding aside, gangrenous hybrids, pests, putrefactors. The Jew has never been persecuted by the Aryans. The Jew persecuted himself. He is damned by his own body, by the tugging of the hybrid meat that he is. From which comes the state of perpetual swaggering, of compensatory uppitiness, the arrogance, the incredible cheek, the head-spinning conceit, the vociferous effrontery, which is so disgusting and repellant.6

Execrable Speech

13

This kind of writing actively encourages hatred of the Jews (although precisely who the Jews are for Céline varies throughout the pamphlets) and demonstrates the author’s sympathy with some of the policies advocated by Hitler. Indeed a general sympathy with the leaders of European fascism is made explicit, ‘personally I find Hitler, Franco and Mussolini to be wonderfully good-natured, admirably magnanimous, in fact in my opinion far too much so, bleating pacifists really, to the tune of 250 Nobel Prizes, awarded outside the competition, by acclaim!’.7 There is something hyperbolic about this admiration as there is also in Céline’s hatred of the Jews. Even if the intention is to exaggerate things for effect this rhetorical excess may work to undermine the ostensible point the author is trying to make. The written may work against the intention of the writer. The first anti-Semitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre, was, in fact, interpreted as an immense joke by André Gide who praised it. He did not extend this sentiment to the two subsequent pamphlets but his initial response amply demonstrates that the meanings a piece of writing accrues often exceed the author’s stated intent. Writing refuses to collaborate with its author. The collaborator Who was the author of the pamphlets? Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (18941961) was one of France’s most important authors in the inter-war years. He usually wrote under the pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Céline (his mother’s first name was Louise-Céline). Céline’s earliest novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), published in 1932, was a best-seller. It follows the life of the character Ferdinand Bardamu, beginning with his experiences in the First World War – through journeys to French colonial Africa and the United States of America – ending up with an account of his time as a doctor working in one of the poorer districts of Paris. His second novel Mort à crédit (Death on Credit) from 1936 was more stylistically innovative and less well received. Both books are based loosely on Céline’s own life. From his first-hand knowledge of the sufferings of the Parisian poor Céline might have been expected to sympathize with socialism but instead he identified increasingly with right wing politics both in the run up to and during the Second World War. Between 1936 and 1942 Céline wrote four ‘pamphlets’, these book-length compositions were ostensible satirical tracts. The first, Mea Culpa (1936), is an attack upon communism and the USSR. The remaining three, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’École des cadavres (1938) and Les Beaux draps (1941) are all primarily anti-Semitic diatribes. It was these works

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which chiefly contributed to Céline’s pariah status after the war. During the Occupation he had friends in the German authorities and was considered by the French SS leader Helmut Knochen as a possible member of the Advisory Committee for the Office Central Juif.8 Not all those Germans who knew Céline were entirely taken by him, however, with Ernst Jünger stating in his journal that ‘there is in him the look that maniacs have, turned inward, which shines as from the bottom of a hole’.9 The author also did not always turn his back on opponents of the occupation. In 1941 he lobbied the Préfet of Finistère to try and prevent the execution of a Breton, Noël L’Helgouarch who had cut a telephone cable leading to a German sentry post. His intervention was unsuccessful. He was also reputed to have given medical treatment to members of the resistance.10 In June 1944 Céline did, however, turn his back on France. He left for Germany accompanied by his wife Lucette and his pet cat Bébert, going first to a hotel in Baden-Baden as guests of the Reich Foreign Ministry, then to a country estate at Kränzlin, before finally ending up at Sigmaringen with most of the rest of the collaborators who had fled France. Céline felt unsafe at Sigmaringen and moved to Denmark in March 1945. He remained there in exile until 1951 when he returned to France after he was granted an amnesty for the sentence of one year’s imprisonment handed down at his trial in absentia in 1950. In his essay Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?, written in August 1945, JeanPaul Sartre provides a psychological appraisal of the collaborator which potentially gives some insight into Céline’s character.11 In the essay, Sartre understands collaboration to be a normal phenomenon equatable with crime and suicide.12 The collaborator lives in ignorance of their collaborationist tendencies until favourable social conditions arise which allow the trait to manifest itself. Collaboration cannot be confounded with a single form of politics (e.g. fascism) nor can it be linked to a particular class (e.g. the bourgeoisie). Rather, for Sartre, it is a decision taken by an individual uninfluenced by such factors. In fact membership of a class or a strong political affiliation would probably make collaboration less likely. The fact that many of the collaborators originated in the bourgeoisie can thus be understood to demonstrate the fragility of such a class identity. The collaborator usually originates in the unassimilated elements of society, at society’s edges. For Sartre, those with a propensity for crime and those likely to commit suicide also derive from the social margins, hence the connection he establishes between the three. The collaborator may come from the fringes of the main political parties, from the upper echelons of the clergy (unhinged by the influence of Rome, hence out of touch with the grassroots

Execrable Speech

15

of French Catholicism) and from royalist remnants in the bourgeoisie. Collaborators mainly emerge from the ‘déchet social’, from society’s detritus.13 Having examined the social origins of collaboration Sartre goes on to study its psychological aspect. He finds that the collaborator will submit to any fait accompli whatever form it takes. This is because such traitors confuse the fact that one must live with an event, with the morality of its occurrence. Because it has happened the traitor presumes it is for the best. He has only a vague notion of progress, in which all change is perceived as progressive. For Sartre, the collaborator goes with the flow, unconcerned by where current events will lead him. With the defeat of France he turns morality on its head, ‘the collaborator who is a realist constructs a reverse morality: instead of judging the fact in the light of its legitimacy, legitimacy is founded on the fact’.14 The fact of the occupation of France is not judged by its legitimacy, rather the fact of the occupation is what lends it legitimacy, is what legitimates. Legitimacy occurs after the fact. Sartre perceives the collaborator as someone who seeks to replace the juridical relations of reciprocity and equality between men and nations with a return to a kind of feudal bond between lord and vassal. He elaborates: … most definitely the feudal relationship between the collaborator and his master has a sexual element to it. In as much as we can conceive of the state of mind of the collaborator, one would guess it to be feminine in nature. The collaborator speaks in the name of power but is not that power, he is the cunning one, the shrewd one who finds support in power, he is even spell-binding and seductive because he asserts and uses the attraction he believes French culture exerts over the Germans. To me it appears that a curious mixture of masochism and homosexuality exists there. Paris’s homosexual meeting-places provided a number of talented recruits in fact.15 This relation between the master and the bondsman has a sexual aspect to it. For Sartre, the question of collaboration is not one of class but of sexuality. The collaborator – who seems to be exclusively male given the examples Sartre lists throughout his essay – is female. Céline’s pamphlets seem too ugly to fit this gendering. Their language is too forceful and vulgar and fails to display the tergiversation that Sartre finds in the feminine. The meaning of the pamphlets is not insidious. These are not feuilles-fatales luring the unsuspecting reader to hate. In the final third of L’École des cadavres, Céline mocks the reader who is contemptuous of his work, writing, ‘if you’ve read this far you’ve already shown character, there’s already proof of a sound hate’.16 The

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politics of the pamphlets are given to the reader up front. The reader who reads more than a few lines knows something of the author’s viewpoint, of the writing’s content, and can choose not to go on. Céline intimates that someone who has reached the last third of the pamphlet must be taking some kind of pleasure from their reading. The kind of writing that would fit Sartre’s description would be one which was more duplicitous than the prose of the pamphlets. It would be an abject writing in the moral sense of the term. The collaborator is a mistress of deception. Collaborationist writing would therefore be expected to display similar artifice. Kristeva describes the turncoat as abject in Powers. Abjection involves ‘the traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior …’.17 It is ‘immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you …’.18 The closest writing to abjection, to a collaborationist writing, that Sartre defines is poetry. Poetry is described by Sartre in What is Literature? as a ‘trap to capture fleeting reality’, one which does not act upon the world but rather receives it.19 The poetic word is an image not a sign, the world is reflected in the word rather than the word reflecting the world. The poetic word seduces the world, entices it into language. It is a space lying in wait for reality. In this, it bears some of the characteristics of the collaborator. This is, perhaps, why Sartre will not even countenance the poetry of the resistance fighter Pierre Emmanuel as an example of committed literature: it is polluted with feeling. It is too feminine. The words have ‘ambiguous properties’ which get in the way of communication.20 But Céline does not appear to be a poet by Sartre’s definition. Sartre explicitly contrasts the writing of poetry with the writing of pamphlets. The pamphlets express things whereas in poetry the words dispossess the writer of expression. Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? also worked to frame the collaborator as homosexual.21 Homosexuality is equated with femininity by Sartre. In Vichy France the collaborators used their powers of seduction, their feminine wiles, to gain acceptance by the German occupying force. Their allure was based upon the cultural make-up of France, its learned appeal. Sartre finds evidence for the feminization of the French nation in the work of several writers, amongst them Robert Brasillach and Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle.22 He writes that these authors use queer metaphors ‘which present Franco-German relations as a kind of sexual union in which France plays the role of the woman’.23 The woman here is a woman-man as Sartre’s subsequent comments about masochism and homosexuality make clear.

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The choice of Brasillach is therefore far from accidental, not because he feminized the French Republic, describing it as ‘an old syphilitic whore, stinking of patchouli and yeast infection’, but because he was a homosexual.24 In her book The Collaborator, Alice Yaeger Kaplan discusses the connections that were made by the prosecution at Brasillach’s trial between collaboration and sexuality. The author was accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’ with the Nazis, a charge usually levelled against French women who had slept with German soldiers.25 Kaplan reads this preoccupation with homosexuality as symptomatic of a crisis in masculinity in France in the immediate aftermath of the occupation, a crisis generated because French men had ‘felt defeated and powerless for four years’.26 They had felt passive, had felt ‘feminine’. France’s male population felt shafted. Sartre’s essay would seem to support such an interpretation. His essay also acts to delineate the collaborator, who is marked out as without delineation, as ambiguous, a person who doesn’t fit in anywhere, an outsider. This definition is provided in order to construct a clear demarcation between the men of the resistance and the ‘women’ who supported the Vichy regime. As Jean Améry explains, this delineation was necessary because ‘the resistance movement during and right after the war became the psychic foundation upon which the nation rested’.27 Transparent distinctions are needed. The collaborators must be clearly demarcated in order to secure the legacy of the resistance. Sartre aligns himself with the latter in the typology he has devised. He conceals his feminine side. This is, after all, the man who accepted a post at the Lycée Condorcet in October 1941 after the ‘retirement’ of the previous Jewish incumbent, Henri Dreyfus-Le Foyer.28 This is also the man who staged performances of Les Mouches under the Occupation in the Théâtre de la Cité (it was originally called the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt but the name was changed, the original Jewish name abandoned), lending what might be interpreted as a cultural credence to Vichy.29 The play was supposed to be subversive but many in the audience seemed to miss the point, unlike the majority who saw Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. Sartre’s contours are not as clearcut as his essay would lead us to believe. He is compromised. The man whose philosophy seemed to offer the best means of judging the way a man behaved during the war could himself be condemned by his own comportment. Sartre’s philosophy is one of personal responsibility: we are free to choose how we act and we make ourselves through our choice of actions (we are in essence what we have done).

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M(anus)cripts The anxiety Sartre manifests about sexuality in his essay on collaboration seems to have also surfaced much earlier, prior to the fall of France. We can trace his uneasiness back to the War Diaries which were written towards the beginning of the war. It is here that Sartre first articulates his fascination with holes in a discussion which he will later incorporate into Being and Nothingness. In these passages, written in December 1939, Sartre seeks to reclaim ‘holes’ from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis: ‘Freud will consider that all holes, for the child, are symbolic anuses which attract him as a function of that kinship, whereas for my part I wonder whether the anus is not, in the child, an object of lust because it is a hole’.30 He claims that the infant’s fascination with holes originates in a holeness that is anterior to their relation to that ‘lyrical hole’ of the anus.31 This meditation on holes occurs immediately after some paragraphs about viscosity and disgust. Sigmund Freud’s own initial arguments about the anushole in On Sexuality appear straight after a section titled ‘Sexual Use of the Mucous Membranes of the Lips and Mouth,’ a section which is primarily about the ‘feeling of disgust’.32 It seems from this structural similarity that Sartre may well have been sleeping with Freud’s writings on sexuality that December. What is certain is that the philosopher demonstrated an interest in anality some years prior to writing Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? In the diaries Sartre writes that ‘the child who holds back his faeces in order to enjoy the pleasure of excretion’ has ‘no means of guessing that he has an anus, nor that this anus presents a similarity with the holes into which – immediately – he seeks to put his fingers’.33 The hole precedes the anus-hole. The fascination with the posterior opening is not a fascination with the posterior but with its holeness. The hole ‘is first and foremost what is not’.34 The hole is negation. The hole opens us to nothingness. As a ‘not’ it attracts us: ‘the vertiginous thrill of the hole comes from the fact that it proposes annihilation, it rescues from facticity’.35 This attraction for the hole is ‘accompanied by repulsion and anguish’.36 The thought of escape into the infinite not is tempered by the love of life, we abject the hole in order to continue to be. Sartre seeks to remove the hole from a discourse about sexuality but the hole is not placed outside gender. The hole often resists, ‘it must be forced, in order to pass through’ and, as such, ‘it is already feminine’.37 The hole is modest. This is why ‘it attracts sexuality’.38 The act of poking into a hole ‘is rape, breaking-in, negation’.39 The hole is feminine, although here femininity is not passive for Sartre: femininity is equated with resistance. The hole is described as a ‘nocturnal female organ of nature, skylight to Nothingness, symbol of chaste and violated refusals, mouth of shadows which engulfs or assimilates’.40

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The hole is poetry. It seems to form part of the poetic language Sartre describes in What is Literature? It is a ‘mirror of the world’.41 The hole is a nothing that Sartre fills with images of the world just as the word is a mirror which the poet passes reflections in front of. Here Sartre passes reflections across the word-hole. All mirrors are holes and all holes are mirrors. In the War Diaries the sexual hole is the vagina. The anus-hole, if it is sought out for sexual pleasures, is therefore implicitly figured as a pseudovagina. A man who desires another man’s hole actually desires a man-woman’s hole. The poking into a hole is ‘pre-sexual’ but the hole is always already sexed.42 There seems to be a tension in these passages around holes and sexuality. Sartre writes of the hole taking on sexual significance only at a secondary level when it becomes ‘the basic layer of signification for the various species of sexual hole’ but then finds holes innately feminine because of their quality of modesty.43 The hole hides ‘nothing’ from us. It resists giving up this nothingness hence we poke it or peer into it. We coax it into revealing what it hides. Nothingness is therefore, by extension, also feminine. Woman is not in Sartre’s world. Or woman is only as resistance, as a refusal to reveal the nothingness concealed behind the modesty. Resistance, like collaboration, is feminine. It differs from collaboration in that it is active even in the appearing passivity of reticence. Modesty resists exorbitance. The collaborator and the resistor are both similar and different. On the muscle The unease Sartre’s writings manifest about sexuality should be understood as evidence of a more general malaise about masculinity that arose in the inter-war years. Céline (an epigraph from whose L’Église prefaces Sartre’s Nausea), displays a similar unease about homosexuality in his pamphlets. The homosexual in the pamphlets is invariably Jewish. Céline believes the Jews subjugate those around them through acts of anal-penetration. As Thomas C. Spears writes, for Céline the Jew is ‘the most frightening incarnation of power: a menacing (negroid) phallus capable of relegating the Aryan, the Jew’s victim and prey, to a position of subservience’.44 In L’École des cadavres, Céline quotes from a letter he supposedly received from an angry Jewish reader: ‘the Yids will reveal you through your arsehole and if you want to get fucked, you just have to let us know’.45 For Céline the Jew poses a threat to his masculinity. Having his hole filled by another man would be a form of emasculation. Céline, however, is already a woman as evinced by his desire to resist the exploration of his hole. His modesty, a trait culturally coded as feminine, feminizes him.

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The femininity Céline celebrates in his writings is, however, at odds with this unassuming conception of womanhood. The women that Céline admires are not passive. Unlike the man-woman Sartre describes in Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?, Céline likes strong women, women who are not women within the parameters of femininity that Sartre sets out in his essay on collaboration, women who might rather be understood as women-men. The author expresses a preference for muscular, puissant females. This fascination is manifested as early as Céline’s first novel in which Bardamu recollects his former lover Molly, remembering ‘her kindness as if it were yesterday, and her long, blond, magnificently strong, lithe legs, noble legs’.46 In Mort à crédit there is an episode recounting how the young Bardamu is waylaid on his way to boarding school by a street vendor called Gwendoline who wants to make love to him. He describes her as not ‘ugly looking … she had charm in her way, even a kind of elegance … She had an ass on her and muscular thighs and cute little boobies’.47 He adds later that she ‘could take care of herself, she was built like a wrestler, she would have turned me like a pancake if I’d started getting real mean!’.48 This preoccupation persists in the pamphlets. In Bagatelles pour un massacre, for example, there is a depiction of the young Russian agent called Nathalie who was assigned to guide Céline during his visit to the Soviet Union: ‘physically she was cute, a Balt, a blonde, hefty, firm, with muscles like her personality, steely’.49 Céline likes iron maidens, tempered, hardened bodies. Making sense of this desire is difficult. It might be argued that Céline fulfils the characteristic disposition that Sartre finds in the collaborator: he is a woman-man but wants a man-woman instead of a straight man. Céline is in denial. Must the strong woman, however, necessarily be understood as a man-woman? In her book about women’s bodybuilding Bodymakers, Leslie Heywood believes the woman bodybuilder, a phenomenon admittedly absent during Céline’s lifetime, to be neither man nor woman. Heywood suggests that female bodybuilders show how ‘contradictions – between, for instance, hard bodies and soft ones; masculine bodies and feminine ones; bodies that seem like you can’t mess with them and bodies that seem like you can; bodies shaped by hours and hours of hard work or by plastic surgery and bodies that are dull and shapeless and fat; bodies that own and create themselves and bodies that are created by someone and something else; bodies that act upon others and bodies that are acted upon by others; bodies that are made through technology like weights or surgery and bodies that refuse those things – are part of us all, both sides of the equation in us’.50 The muscular ‘woman’ is therefore an undecidable. S/he brings to the surface a series of ‘contradictory cultural meanings’ such that ‘it is impossible to reduce the female body

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and the femininity associated with it to one particular, natural, unchangeable thing’.51 S/he cannot be fixed within any of the oppositions or antinomies which are used to account for ‘her’, rather s/he resists and disorganizes them. Céline, by desiring muscular women, desires neither men nor women but both men and women, or perhaps a set of bodies that remain beyond either category: neither woman nor not-woman. What Céline wants resists pigeonholing. This resistance resists gendering and, by extension, resists Sartre’s gendering of resistance. Céline craves contour and matter more than sex. It is not breasts or buttocks he likes, it is rather their texture, their firmness and solidity. He writes of a maid’s breasts, ‘you can’t imagine how hard they were … The more you shook them, the harder they got … They were solid rock’.52 It would be possible to read this hardness as a fetish, a stand-in produced to make good the lack, the threat of castration.53 The firmness is a substitute for the mother’s penis.54 Muscles are pseudo-penises. This reading, however, whilst possible is certainly not obligatory. The desire for flesh that stands out, for hard bodies, might equally be interpreted as a desire for androgyny (despite the usual equation of hardness with masculinity, with the erection). Nathalie Gassel suggests that ‘an extremely strong woman athlete is no longer a woman. She is a heteroclite, a third sex, androgynous’.55 She wishes that her own athletic body ‘was wholly like a hard member’.56 The body becomes an erection but not an easily sexed one. First and foremost, Céline desires matter: he desires a body that has risen above and beyond itself, that has becomes a second skin resting upon the normative aforeskin. The primary body, the inherited body, the cultural body, the body that is no body, is anybody, the anonymous body, is not the body Céline looks for and at. He likes a cultured body that stands out from the corporeal crowd. The ‘sexiness’ of these bodies resides not in the sex but in the flesh itself. These are bodies ‘before all else, outside of any sexing although entirely sexuate’.57 These are bodies that have broken with the cultural template, bodies that push against the expected and the accepted, bodies like that of the woman who cracks ‘nuts with her fists … a staggering blow from way up, enough to split the table wide open. The whole work-shop shook … She was quite a number … a former model … I found that out later … The type appealed to me’.58 These are bodies that are unexpected. Céline is seduced by the substantial. He desires the body that has definition. He prefers women with profiles. He seeks shape amidst the shapeless and likes women who appear to have given form to their bodies rather than allowing their bodies to be formed for them. These women design their bodies, consciously, unconsciously, or perhaps not at all, perhaps solely in the mind of the author. Design is a practice of outlining, a production of contours.59

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Céline likes women with curves, women with lines. His is a passion for circumscription. Céline’s love of contours is motivated by the fear of a loss of contour. The muscular body has a certainty to it which Céline enjoys seeing. He appreciates the integrity of these bodies. They are inviolate. They provide ‘a demarcation between outside and in that you can rely on’.60 Céline, however, lives in constant fear of corporeal violation, of having the boundaries of his body broken, intruded upon by another. He is afraid of losing his edge. This is what motivates him to takes pleasure in outlines. He likes to appreciate bodies, but from a distance. Céline’s pleasures are often scopophilic.61 The recurring theme of voyeurism in his writings originates in this wish to savour the boundaries of bodies rather than breach them. His love of ballet derives from the possibility of seeing shapely women from a distance.62 The temptation to touch the body and break with the bodily integrity that is guaranteed by separation is removed. Penetrative sex is a two becoming one. It involves the temporary sacrifice of identity. As Leo Bersani writes, sex involves a ‘self shattering and solipsistic jouissance’.63 Céline’s fear of the selfless act of sex manifests itself in his phobia of being fucked in the anus. Bersani writes that in anal sex the one who is penetrated embraces ‘the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman’.64 If woman is taken to be ‘nothing’ – as Sartre intimates she ‘is’ – then this ecstasy is the ecstasy of a touching nothingness, of a becoming nothing, or perhaps of an unbecoming. Céline however wishes to remain something: he therefore refuses to be fucked. He asserts his manhood through his writing. Both Céline and Sartre exhibit an anxiety about the seductiveness of the man who like men. Céline locates this seductiveness in their writings. He understands most writing to be written in a dead language, one which seduces through illusion. Its ruse resides in its over-ornamentation. Céline illustrates this kind of attraction by deception through the imagined response of the literary critic Yves Gandon to a piece of contemporary writing. Gandon is impressed by ‘… an exquisite stream of indescribable embellishments … passages that become more and more sublime … vertiginous cadences … these masterful pieces … are literally magical, a revelatory flow of incalculable aesthetic contributions …’.65 As Céline demonstrates, the text proves irresistible: Gandon, transformed in the interim, inflamed by the dedication, cannot take it any longer … He surrenders! … He gives himself! … He begs us to help him. Ah! Quick! Do something, help! Hold on Gandon! … Expect the worst! Anticipate a grisly end … Mercy! We want all the details! Let’s share the climax! Humanity demands it! Hang in there! Be brave! It’s easy, the choice is his, either he does or he doesn’t! It’s death!

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In language! By language! Overcome by beauty! … by linguistic Beauty! Gandon! Ah! 66 The critic, the reader, dies in the pleasure of reading, a little death. In the instant of orgasm, in the ‘ah’, Gandon comes to be language. The one seduced becomes a part of the seduction. This ejaculatory reading is an unmanning. Gandon is emasculated by language. The text which so impresses him, so emasculates him, is one produced by writers who are described by Céline as enjuivé or Jewified. It is written in ‘Jewish highschool French, Anatole the Jewified French, Goncourt French, French that is disgustingly elegant, calligraphic, exotic, unctuous, slippery as shit, it’s the epitaph of the French race’.67 Here Gandon’s death is precipitated by a delight in language. Céline, however, also describes language itself as lifeless. He sees contemporary literature as ‘much more dead than death’.68 For Céline, writing itself is dead. The reader dies into it, in a self-shattering necrophiliac literary copulation. The vertiginous elements of the text that impress Gandon and lead him on evoke the ‘vertiginous thrill of annihilation that is black magic’, the thrill that is the hole.69 Céline describes readers such as Gandon, readers who cannot resist reading, as robots.70 The robotization of the individual is a phenomenon that Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is symptomatic of the increasing magnetism the mass has for the individual, it marks the disappearance of the individual into the mass. Robotization was a product of the nationalization of man, it arrived when the belief arose that the divine origin of man had become bound to the nation.71 The rise of mass movements leads to a situation in which ‘the difference between ends and means evaporates together with the personality, and the result is the monstrous immorality of ideological politics’.72 The flows of the mass movements are reminiscent of Sartre’s collaborator (who is carried along by the tide of history) except that no reversal of principles is involved. The mass is unprincipled. Paper cuts For Céline, most contemporary authors are afraid of direct emotional contact with their readership. Emotion is perceived by these authors to cause certain death. It is a social disease to be avoided at all costs. They avoid encountering emotion by hiding underwater in diving suits, only communicating with the social surface by way of microphones.73 These authors are either Jewish or Jewified. The Jew is afraid of real emotion ‘like the snake is of the mongoose’.74 One of the few authors to believe he can confront real emotions is,

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of course, Céline. His hate is obvious in the pamphlets, as is his fear. Sartre writes of the author’s anti-Semitism: Look at Céline: his vision of the universe is catastrophic. The Jew is everywhere, the earth is lost, it is up to the Aryan not to compromise, never to make peace. Yet he must be on his guard: if he breathes, he has already lost his purity, for the very air that penetrates his bronchial tubes is contaminated. Does that not read like a diatribe by a Manichean? If Céline supported the socialist theses of the Nazis, it was because he was paid to do so. At the bottom of his heart he did not believe in them. For him there is no solution except collective suicide, nonreproduction, death.75 Sartre is right that for Céline the Jew is all pervasive. The Jew is everywhere and nowhere.76 This is because the mark of his difference is invisible. As Frantz Fanon explains, ‘he is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed’.77 This ability for the Jew to pass as an Aryan might be what prompts Céline’s desperate efforts to ‘colour’ him. Céline’s fear, however, may not just be because of the perpetual possibility of encountering the Jew. Earlier it was suggested that Céline’s love of the shapely body, the hardened flesh, did not necessarily need to be understood as a form of fetishism, a means of warding off the fear of castration. It is clear, however, that the author does manifest castration anxiety in the pamphlets. Spear notes that the Jews for Céline present ‘the frightful spectre of his own castration (circumcision) and mirror his own persecution complex but are also worthy of his envy because of the virile force of mastery and influence that they represent for him and that he clearly seeks for himself ’.78 Céline at once fears the Jews and admires them. He was himself circumcised.79 The connection that exists between circumcision and the fear of castration is discussed by Freud in footnotes to the case study of ‘Little Hans’ (1909) and to the essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1910).80 In a footnote to ‘Little Hans’ Freud analyses Otto Weininger’s hatred of Jews and women. An Austrian Jew, Weininger wrote the once influential Sex and Character in which he proposes that femininity and Jewishness are profoundly linked.81 Weininger killed himself in the same year that it was published. Freud writes that Weininger, whom he identifies as a neurotic, was ‘completely under the sway of his infantile complexes; and from that standpoint what is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex’.82 The Jewish male is related to the castration complex through circumcision. It is ‘the

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deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis – a piece of his penis, they think – and this gives them the right to despise Jews’.83 Céline hates Jews like Weininger yet, although not Jewish, he shares the Austrian author’s mark of Jewishness. For either aesthetic or hygienic reasons Céline was, as mentioned earlier, circumcised. This was a rare occurrence outside of Judaism in France at the time. Céline cannot ignore the religious connotations inscribed upon his body (he is incapable of overlooking the Jew inscribed in him). His hatred of the Jews is a hatred of himself. His fear of the Jews is a fear of the cut he shares with them. He seeks to paper over his exposed glans with writing, trying to ‘uncircumcise’ himself, to make good his lack and restore his racial purity. Through hatred he endeavours to cultivate a new foreskin. Céline’s preoccupation with the circumcised prepuce is emphasized by Kristeva in Powers. She provides an example from Les Beaux draps to illustrate this but references to circumcision are plentiful in the pamphlets.84 Céline believes that ‘if Bergson was not cut, if Proust was only Breton, if Freud did not have the mark … we would not speak of any one of them …’.85 He states that ‘the circumcised Jew is in the process of castrating the natural emotional rhythm of the Aryan’.86 This is a statement written by a marked man. How is Céline’s articulation of hatred towards the Jews influenced by his own affinity with them? Perhaps this affinity is manifested by the way Céline hides it. He desires bodies that stand out, that are well-defined, whilst he conceals his own body which he feels to be incomplete. The cut has compromised his contours. The cut has created a hole in his identity. He feels himself, his self, incomplete. The writings are journeys into this hole. He uses language to try and fill it. This echoes Sartre’s eagerness to make good his holes: both writers share a perceived lack. In this context the child’s need to expel faeces, which Sartre understands to be motivated solely by the ‘pleasure of excretion’,87 might also be a manifestation of the need to create a ‘phallus with which the infantile imagination provides the feminine sex’.88 The hole is therefore correctly identified with the feminine by Sartre but not because of its modesty, rather for what it is not, it is not the penis, it lacks: stuffing the hole therefore means making it whole. Sartre’s writing is such filler. The horror, the horror The collaborator for Sartre functions in a similar way to the Jew for Céline, both form holes which these writers fill with their personal anxieties and with the anxiety of an age. The fact that the Jew is figuration in Céline does not

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mitigate the author’s actions. The Jew can, in one sense, never be anything more than a ceaseless figuring but this kind of reading ignores the Jews outside the text, those who must live with the effects of Céline’s crafted hatred. It is not enough to say that Céline writes of his fears rather than acting upon them. Writing is a doing, it is ‘sensuous human activity’.89 It is a practice which has real effects. In seeking to make a distinction between the prosewriter and the poet, Sartre suggests that ‘there is nothing in common between these two acts of writing except the movement of the hand which traces the letters’.90 This attention to graphic gestures foregrounds what unifies all writing. It is all tied to the way the hand advance across the page, the turns it performs, the characters it forms. It is these motions which produce the words that will have an impact beyond the text. The author, poet or prosewriter, must be made responsible for the movement of their hand. We must not amputate the hand that writes: we must not think of the writer as a ‘hand, cut off from any voice’.91 Céline had a hand in what he wrote yet to think like this is to impose intention upon the text. Céline and Sartre are collaborators in a project designed to assuage their anxieties about identity. This is the reason behind their writing. They allow the margins of society to bear the burden of their fears, the homosexual, the Jew, the homosexual Jew. To identify the impulses that underlie these writings does not, however, help to gauge the role of the writing itself in the communication of extreme sentiments. How much are words to blame? Can writing work against the words that form it? In his lecture Leçons, Barthes recommended reading Céline because of the ‘work of displacement he exercises on language’.92 Céline produces shifts in emphasis within language. He moves things around, makes words mean in new and different ways. This work of displacement is a force of freedom within language and exists independently of the politics of the author.93 Barthes believes that language is its own politics and the best way to engage with its politics is on the plane of language, ‘not by the message for which it is the medium, but by the word play for which it is the stage’.94 Language is not exhausted by the meaning it effects: it ‘can survive the meaning it carries and make audible in it, through an often terrifying echo, something other than what it says’.95 Writing can challenge the words that constitute it. It does this through style. Style for Céline is ‘first of all, before all else, above all, an emotion’.96 He adds that style is ‘music’. The writing that resists has rhythm and feeling. Barthes’s discussion of displacement in language is drawn from works like Kristeva’s Revolution. In Revolution, Kristeva describes how an unstable thetic (often the product of a resistance to the discovery of castration) tends to remove language from its symbolic function

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(sign-syntax) and then exhibit it in a semiotic articulation through a material support such as the voice, ‘this semiotic network gives “music” to literature’.97 The thetic phase is the period when the child takes up a position within language. It marks the break that produces subject and object.98 It is the moment in which the gap is instituted that makes enunciation possible. An unstable thetic is a thetic that is troubled by the drives and their articulations, by the semiotic. This musical troubling of the symbolic is only relative, ‘the thetic continues to ensure the position of the subject put in process/on trial’.99 The position of the subject is maintained by the thetic but the irruption of the semiotic within the symbolic places the subject en procès. Poetic language ‘puts the subject in process/on trial through a network of marks and semiotic facilitations’.100 If Céline employs poetic language in the pamphlets then he courts desubjectification (without ever quite achieving his aim) through the displacements that he creates, the linguistic openings he provides for the semiotic to erupt into the symbolic. He attempts annihilation through writing – seeks to murder his self (sui caedes) – but the thetic constantly rescues him. He cannot reach the end of the night, just journey towards it. Only death could bring him to this end, to the heart of darkness, as Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz glimpsed in his final moments, when he ‘cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!”’.101 The horror is the night and both are the abject. For Kristeva ‘abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be – maintaining the night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out’.102 Abjection mediates the subject’s relationship with its impossible origin. In the absence of such mediation the subject would cease to be. The vision Kurtz has is of having no vision, he sees darkness, the unseeing I. He sees his self ending. Céline was one of Arendt’s surplus men, ‘the scum of the big cities’,103 who went to Africa because in Europe they were merely ‘human debris’, a body of ‘superfluous working power’.104 He came from the unemployed edge of the community which, in the Sartrean scheme of things, would give him good credentials for becoming a collaborator. His Journey to the End of the Night mirrors Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), the novella Arendt uses to deftly reveal the nature of those men who formed the bulk of the European exodus to Africa.105 For the scrambling European, Africa was a world without accepted social values. It was a breeding ground for the oppressive personality, men for whom ‘the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a splendid leader

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of an extreme party’.106 In this environment members of high society and criminal elements were fused together in such a way that a refined atmosphere developed around wrongdoing. For the criminal, this ‘refinement, the very contrast between the brutality of the crime and the manner of carrying it out, becomes the bridge of deep understanding between himself and the perfect gentleman’.107 Crime developed a veneer of civility in colonial Africa. It dissembled. This deceit, rendering it similar to collaboration, lends it its abject quality. Imperialism, the building of an Empire, took men outside the boundaries of a familiar culture with inherent (if unnoticed) rites of purification and long-standing classifications of concrete and moral forms of defilement, and into a world without bounds. It left the subject open to the abject. It is out of this environment that Céline’s ideology of hate may have originated. In the pamphlets the Jew is often equated with the African: ‘the Jew is a nigger, the Semitic race doesn’t exist, it was invented by the freemasons, the Jew is just the result of interbreeding between niggers and Asian savages’.108 He is nothing but ‘an eternal beast in tom-toms’.109 Céline does not always conceive of the Africans in negative terms, however, writing of the Africans whose presence upsets him in France that: In Africa, in Cameroon, I lived alone for years with the same blacks, or their relatives, in one of their villages in the middle of the forest, under the same straw-roof, sharing the same gourd. In Africa they are a decent people. It’s over here that they get on my nerves, that they disgust me.110 Everything must be in its place. The Africans are fine in Africa but not in France. They must not exist at the centre of Céline’s world, only at its margins. They represent his outside, an outside that the Jews are also supposed to embody. In Céline’s world the Jews do not know their place, which is to be ‘out of place’. They are too at home. In journeying to Africa, Céline ‘had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it’, abjected.111 As the solitary Frenchman he was gifted an identity. His identity was secured, surrounded as he was by the Other. On his return to France he became one amongst many again, all the same. The African in France occupies a similar position to the one Céline once did, they become the singular individual who stands out. Unlike Céline however, they are not in a position of presumed superiority but must endure being perceived as inferior. Céline dislikes the African in France because he envies them. He dislikes the Jew because whilst at one level he cannot distinguish himself from them (he is circumcised) at another

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he cannot be at one with them. He is not Jewish. His envy of the Jew, whilst provoking his resentment, manifests his desire to be at one with the Jew, to become Jew. Although he is a part of society in France he feels apart from society. He feels he does not belong. He is alone. Céline’s loneliness exhibits itself in his increasing use of the three points of suspension … holes in writing which figure nothingness. Sartre wrote a passage that is important for making sense of these holes: The abyss is a hole, it proposes engulfment. And engulfment always attracts, as a nihilation which would be its own foundation. Of course, attraction for a hole is accompanied by repulsion and anguish. But the hole’s nothingness is coloured: it’s a black nothingness, which causes another nature to intervene here, another cardinal category – Night.112 The black hole offers a journey into the night. It is the apocalypse. The hole … is the hole we all have within the Self … even as we think of ourselves as whole. Lacan described pre-psychosis, the beginnings of a loss of self, as ‘the feeling that the subject has come to the edge of a hole’.113 The hole is the negated ground of the I. It is the sty that torments it. It is the before of our becoming. The ‘one story the “I” cannot tell is the story of its own emergence as an “I”’.114 The ‘I’ in any story (and Céline’s is no exception) ‘constitutes a point of opacity and, indeed, in that sense, constitutes an interruption of sequence, a break in the narrative, the eruption of the non-narrativizable in the midst of the story’.115 The ‘I’ is figured through the ellipses … the breaks in Céline’s narrative. The points of suspension represent the ripples that cloud the reflection of Narcissus in the pond, ‘that muddle its bed’,116 the dots demonstrate that the ‘more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed’.117 The holes suggest I am not whole. They call to mind Sartre’s conception of the Being-for-Itself when a person places himself at a distance from someone or something else so he can acknowledge their alterity and in the same instant generate the ‘gap’ that is freedom. There is emptiness and anguish in this action. The hole denotes the internalization of this act. I acknowledge I am other than I, that I exist as and through a gap. To acknowledge this gap, what was left behind but is still before me, would be to end me. The (M)Other that I rejected to become Self cannot be known to me. The I is condemned to solitude. I must, however, work to preserve this loneliness that is I. I must continually abject the Mother. As mentioned earlier, the increasingly secular society in Europe in the early Twentieth century led to a breakdown in the efficacy of the religious

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mechanisms which existed to cathect the abject. In this secular climate the abject encroached upon the individual, imperiled the subject. The loneliness that Arendt describes as a by-product of society’s competitive structure might also be understood as symptomatic of a mass identity crisis bought on by a horror that can no longer be pushed aside but instead ferments within. The nothingness kept at the edges of the social now threatens to ‘engulf ’ it from inside. The self becomes aware of the separation that founds it: it comes to know it is alone. It knows that it has lost but not what it has lost. Arendt understands totalitarian domination to be founded upon the exploitation of this loneliness, this ‘experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’.118 Man is cut off from what matters. He lives within the mirror. In loneliness ‘self and world’ and the ‘capacity for thought and experience’ are lost.119 This loss is only known by looking to the other for confirmation of it. It is when we are alone in company that we truly learn of our loneliness.120 Totalitarianism exploited the loneliness of man in Western Europe. Kristeva is therefore correct to identify ‘the “drive-foundations” of fascism’ in abjection. Abjection ‘is the economy, one of horror and suffering in their libidinal surplusvalue, which has been tapped, rationalized, and made operative by Nazism and Fascism’.121 The mass movements offered logic for a society of individuals slipping into psychosis, they provided a sense of belonging and a set of contours. Arendt explains that ‘the only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident’.122 National Socialism and the other mass movements give the human mind a consistent set of rules to adhere to and to think by. They provide logic to keep the individual company. Totalitarianism offers a ‘suicidal escape’ for the individual from their reality of being alone.123 The mass movement is a closing of space, the destruction of contradictions forming one aspect of this process, designed to nullify ‘even the productive potentialities of isolation’.124 ‘The “ice-cold reasoning” and the “mighty tentacle” of dialectics which “seizes you as in a vise” appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon’.125 Abjection is the irrational which provides the impulse to rationalize but also offers a means by which to trouble the rational. Céline’s writings develop across this space of support and disruption. His writings, as Barthes recognized, do not simply portray the impact of the social conditions of the time upon individuals but, instead, enacts them. Barthes suggests that in Céline’s work ‘writing is not at the service of thought’ but instead represents ‘the writer’s descent into the sticky opacity of the condition which he is describing’.126

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The epigraph from Céline’s L’Église which prefaces Sartre’s Nausea, ‘C’est un garçon sans importance collective, c’est tout juste un individu’, is one which emphasizes the solitude of the individual who exists in a ‘state of absolute desolation’.127 Kristeva draws attention to this connection with solitude in her chapter on Sartre in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. She reads the character of Roquentin in Nausea as sending us ‘back to the depressive solitude of the contemporary individual’.128 This loneliness is ‘rooted in the personal experience of the impossible link to the other that is ultimately the maternal object, although the dissolution of all social links follows from this microuniverse’.129 A link between abjection and loneliness is implicit in this passage. The personal experience of the impossible link to the mother is one of abjection. The mother is the nothing within the subject which is ‘accessible only in nausea’.130 The ‘spasms and vomiting that protect me’131 from the mother are also my most intimate moments with that object. Céline writes towards this nothing, this darkness, approaching the edge of the night. In the pamphlets the figure of the Jew poses a continual threat to Céline’s bodily integrity. This occurs at the level of content. At the level of style, Céline enacts the very threat that he claims to be afraid of. He seeks to write himself into the hole out of which he became. He compromises his self. He voyages into the twilight, his language carrying him close to ‘the place where meaning collapses’.132 He writes himself to the brink of psychosis and ‘risks the loss of identity’ that accompanies it.133 The style (when supplemented by a material support such as the voice) permits the reader (and the writer reads) to sample this proximity to psychosis and to bathe in the attendant semiotic excess. The reader looks through the night towards its end but does not touch that end. This is reading as if walking a tightrope: the eyes see the ground beneath but the aim is to keep the relation a specular one. The ground of the self is glimpsed not known. To fall is to die. The reader risks falling in with Céline’s style and falling out of self. Kristeva describes what is involved as going beyond ‘the content of the novels, the author’s biography or his indefensible political stands (fascist, anti-Semitic); the true “miracle” of Céline resides in the very experience of one’s reading – it is fascinating, mysterious, intimately nocturnal, and liberating by means of a laughter without complacency yet complicitous’.134 The laughter discharges the semiotic. Laughter preserves the self. It is a kind of vomiting. Céline exposes the beneath of language, the ‘infrasignificatory substratum to language’.135 Signifiance is the ‘unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and through language’.136 The drives that carry language and exist as its underside in the everyday are bought to the surface through his writing. He shows us the semiotic, the side to writing which has sense without

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significance. The semiotic is the lining that holds language together and allows for meaning. It exists in the rhythms of the tongue, the sounds around words, which are integral to language but also eternally elusive within it. It is the shimmer of words on a page, the energy extant within the characters and between them. Works of literature like those of Céline act to bring the drives usually clothed by the symbolic to the forefront of writing. He bares language for us. Emmanuel Lévinas’s observation that it ‘is the great merit of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, thanks to a marvellous flair for language, to have undressed the universe in a sad and desperate cynicism’ could be interpreted in this way.137 Beneath the ostensible calm of the words floating upon the page, there is an immemorial violence at play. Like it was going out of style … In the inter-war years the social mechanisms designed to keep the semiotic from flooding the symbolic (and thereby engulfing culture) were in crisis. The abject (the repressed maternal, the fount of the semiotic) threatened to overwhelm the subject. As discussed earlier, in Powers Kristeva uses the writings of Céline as the mainstay for her argument that, in the contemporary western world, literature has replaced the sacred as the site where abjection is sublimated. For Kristeva abjection is a key process during the formation of the subject. It is the action of separation which is a necessary precursor to the mirror-phase. Lacan describes the mirror-phase as a drama ‘whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation’.138 The child exists within a somatic maelstrom, a mess of bodily functions, living only as its insides. The mirror provides the child with a passport to the outside, the reflection it affords anchors the fragmented body-image to ‘a form of its totality’ that exists exterior to it.139 This is not, however, the first journey the infant undertakes. Lacan does not delve deeply enough into the pre-history of the subject. He accounts for the stage at which the child ‘is’ but ‘is’ only as ‘frustration’, ‘is’ as a body that baffles and bewilders but which is felt as a singular insufficiency: I am not up to the task of being me but I know that I am. The child is already a desiring being, a wanting self-sufficiency. The time of maternal plenitude has passed and will shortly become the past.140 Kristeva seeks to explain how the child separates from the mother in order for the mirror-phase to take place. She describes how for the infant prior to the ‘that’s me in the mirror’ of the mirror-phase there must also be a recognition of ‘that’s not me’ in relation to the mother. Abjection ‘is a precondition of narcissism’.141 ‘Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject’.142 Abjection, the series

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of partial and provisional separations from the mother that make the mirrorphase possible, is repressed by the subject as not to do so would require it to confront its own brittleness. ‘The more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed’.143 The abject is a part of us but a part of us that it is dangerous to acknowledge. It is an aspect that must be kept apart, that must be managed. This management role was previously performed by the sacred. Abjection ‘accompanies all religious structurings’ and the ‘various means of purifying the abject – the various catharses – make up the history of religions’.144 In the predominantly secular society that exists in the contemporary Western world, the role of purification falls to the artist. The ‘aesthetic task’ in the present ‘amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression’.145 Céline writes back to the mother out of which he became. He also unwrites the symbolic in the process, therefore opening it up to a possible rewriting. Such a challenge to the symbolic function could potentially lead to psychosis but Céline’s texts are ‘able to master this latent psychotic state’ through their ‘literary devices and writing style’.146 Modernist writing, as exemplified by Céline, must of necessity touch the void that is psychosis. The modernist aesthetic functions to sublimate the abject, that which would otherwise destroy the subject through overwhelming the symbolic and rendering the subject psychotic. The abject is that which exceeds the rational. It is the force of unreason that Michel Foucault describes in the conclusion to Madness and Civilization, a force that must be cathected. ‘There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art, the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth’.147 The work of art plays out psychic violence in language rather than in reality. Kelly Oliver writes of this cathection, ‘… poetic murders are better than real murders’.148 The defence of Céline is that he writes hatred rather than enacts it. Was it, however, this flirtation with psychosis in his writings that prompted Céline’s identification with fascism? Does Céline compensate for the effects of this literary journey into the night by affiliating himself with a mass movement? Does he regain a sense of identity through his anti-Semitism and his politics? Is Céline really practicing poetic rather than real murder (as Oliver suggests) or is his writing, in fact, a step in the direction of real massacres? The meaning of Céline’s words is unclear. The point is disrupted. His message of hate finds that the medium of writing resists it. Sartre felt that style

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was not something the politically committed writer should foreground. It should rather ‘pass unnoticed’.149 The aesthetic qualities of a text are perceived by him as of secondary importance. For Kristeva, however, style is a key component in the production of change. Through his style Céline does battle with the symbolic function. He does not collaborate with the symbolic like a bondsman bending to the will of his master, rather he resists it. He breaks free from it, opening up the possibility of re-appropriating it.150 The calling into question of language in its symbolic aspect ‘represents a microrevolution’ and ‘is something that affects the social fabric and can potentially challenge the entire social framework’.151 Style, which is on the side of the aesthetic, likes to follow its own path. It is individual and therefore antitotalitarian. Writing in style provides evidence of an author who chooses a path for language to follow rather than following the path of language. This author is unconventional. The author who has a distinct style (that is to say any style at all, unless an absence of style becomes stylish) creates himself in language. He is his style. A stylish author is involved with language. Céline has style and through it he deprives the symbolic of its privileged status but he fails to carry out its reappropriation. His writings exist in a semiotic limbo. The cost of partially undoing the symbolic without renewing its authority was an identity crisis that required the author to identify with extreme politics. He lost himself. … It is within Céline’s style, a style best registered through reading his work aloud, although the internal voice of the mind lends sufficient support, that the way language resists the oppressive politics it is sometimes burdened with becomes evident. What, however, are these three dots … bridges between groups of words … points of suspension … puncture holes in the prose? They are all and none of these things. Are the ellipses, perhaps, holes? If they are, then where are they holes? Is the hole the black spot upon the page … the dot? Is it in the space … between the dots? Is it in the caesura … the pause it institutes in the speaking or reading of a passage … the interruption in the arc of the eye as it travels right across the writing? Are these the holes? The holes which were present in Journey to the End of the Night … but not so much as to be especially noticeable … the holes that end a number of lines in L’Église … the holes … that are increasingly … in evidence … in Death on Credit … and omnipresent in Rigadoon.152 What do these holes do? If indeed they are holes. If they are dots instead then they are marks: a kind of presence. The hole is an absence, or a word, ‘hole’, hiding an absence, hiding emptiness.

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Gilles Deleuze reads the three dots in Céline’s novel Guignol’s Band as working alongside exclamatory sentences to ‘do away with all syntax in favour of a pure dance of words’.153 This seems at least partially to accord with Kristeva’s understanding of the ellipses. She suggests that in pure literary style ‘all that remains is the tune, without notes … Not even the worship of Death … The three dots … Less than nothing, or more … Something else … The consuming of Everything, of Nothing, through style … The greatest homage to the Word that was not made flesh in order to hoist itself up into Man with a capital letter but to join, body and language being mingled, those intermediate states, those non-states, neither subject nor object, where you is alone, singular, untouchable, unsociable, discredited, at the end of a night that is as particular as it is incommensurable’.154 Both Deleuze and Kristeva find a rhythm in Céline’s prose, a dance or music. The three dots constitute an asemantic element in the texts. They carry the reader out of the comforting contours of meaning, the symbolic, and into the amorphous pulse of the semiotic. To read into this throbbing prose is to place oneself at risk. We usually search for meaning. We do not seek out its dissolution. This is, perhaps, why some readers are unwilling to join in the dance, why some readers never want to step beyond the content of his writing. Céline’s pamphlets, and to a lesser extent his novels, are shaped by his politics. His style, however, does not run to form but away from it. In Céline’s writing there flows through meaning ‘the non-semanticized instinctual drive that precedes and exceeds meaning’.155 The exclamation marks and the three dots point to ‘this surge of instinctual drive: a panting, a breathlessness, an acceleration of verbal utterance, concerned not so much with finally reaching a global summing up of the world’s meaning, as, to the contrary, with revealing, within the interstices of predication, the rhythm of a drive that remains forever unsatisfied – in the vacancy of judging consciousness and sign – because it could not find an other (an addressee) so as to find meaning in this exchange’.156 Céline’s writing attempts to liberate what foments beneath the symbolic structure, to free up the semiotic, and thus to discharge it. His writing explodes in response to the pressure of semiotic excess, a non-sense that needs an outlet. Kristeva writes of the pamphlets that they demonstrate how ‘it is not enough to allow what is repressed by the symbolic structure to emerge in a “musicated” language to avoid its traps’.157 The extreme politics provides a sense of identity in a time of crisis. The politics counter-balanced the descent into non-sense, the falling into formlessness of the writings. The writing is, however, in part, beyond the politics it ostensibly espouses. The political is a shaping of the social. The music in Céline’s prose is anti-social and unshaped.

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It is underneath, outside and beyond politics. It is a noise where no slogans can be heard, a non-space apart from all parties. This noise, this interference, which Céline introduces into the symbolic, is the cause of a loathing which power can tap into. Jacqueline Rose explains that ‘Céline’s writing is a symptom. It reveals horror as a matter of power, the power of fascination when we are confronted with the traces of our own psychic violence, the horror when that same violence calls on social institutions for legitimation, and receives it’.158 Céline’s writing allows the reader access to the horror out of which we become whilst also revealing the dangers we confront when that same horror (which forever haunts us as subjects) can find no release. The horror within ourselves then becomes projected onto another. In Céline this other is multiple but in the pamphlets it is primarily embodied in the figure of the Jew. The pamphlets demonstrate how drive forces can be voided through language but also point towards the potential for a violent projection of these impulses onto others if they are not expelled. Céline out of context The holes in Céline … seem to slow writing … to slow reading … to break it up … to make movement difficult … to bring it to our attention … that we move through writing. The writing within the pamphlets is about movement … mass movements … totalitarianism. Movements rely upon motion: ‘the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement’.159 In the same motion … with the same hand … that Céline uses to lend support to totalitarianism … with which he produces the content of his writings … he writes against it. The potentially subversive nature of Céline’s style was obviously recognized in wartime Germany where the stylistic innovations of Bagatelles pour un massacre were removed in translation. Arendt identifies a dislike for artistic innovation in totalitarian movements, this because total domination does not permit ‘free initiative in any field of life’, and does not allow ‘for any activity that is not entirely predictable’.160 Céline may have produced writings whose content lent support to totalitarian objectives but how influential his work was on those objectives is open to question. As Arendt indicates of those from the elite ‘who at one time or another have let themselves be seduced by totalitarian movements, and who sometimes, because of their intellectual abilities, are even accused of having inspired totalitarianism, it must be stated that what these desperate men of the twentieth century did or did not do had no influence on totalitarianism whatsoever’.161 The pamphlets did not inspire the politics.

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The politics distrusted the pamphlets. Susan Sontag suggests that the only major artist who wholly identified with the Third Reich was Leni Riefenstahl. She contends that Céline is not instructive when it comes to analysing fascist aesthetics.162 The reason behind this may be because the author did associate himself with fascism but misidentified how those politics translate into art: fascist art is realist. It possesses a singularity of purpose and generates a uniform response. Rifkin suggests the ideal spectator for a Riefenstahl film is ‘the same person at the same moment’, it is a fused audience.163 Céline’s work is simply too confusing, too divisive to create this condition of reception. Whilst the occupiers and many of those with fascist sympathies disowned the pamphlets this should not detract from the fact that they were, however, read. Céline is not excused simply because he was not fully accepted by those in authority. His writings had effects. The language of Céline gains its driving force from a feeling of loneliness. The absence of an Other (of which the absence of the (M)Other provides the archetypal model) against which to identify causes a self-fragility. Céline’s language is complicit with his politics, carrying as it does an Other who is everywhere, the all-encompassing hatefigure of the Jew,164 to a wider audience. This ‘carrying to a wider audience’ as a sign of guilt, as a part of evidence for the case of the prosecution against Céline, could also be extended to an accusation against all those who engage with Céline’s pamphlets in whatever capacity. They are all carriers of his ideas even when they condemn them. Kristeva therefore should be held accountable here. Oliver, whilst troubled by Kristeva’s use of Céline, is also willing to give the thinker the benefit of the doubt.165 This benevolence is not, however, universally shared. Jennifer Stone, for example, writes in her essay ‘The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva’, that Kristeva ‘has no political or ideological bearings when faced with Céline’s cadaver’ and accuses her of having a ‘hypnotic and nauseating fascination with fascism’.166 In her book Reproductions of Banality, Alice Yaeger Kaplan also expresses disquiet with Kristeva’s ‘rescue of Céline’.167 The ‘aesthetic links in “Powers of Horror” are specifically to prehistorical, authorless forms of language production’ which means that the ‘historical context drops out of the picture’.168 This presents severe problems for any effort to understand of the nature of Céline’s fascism. For Kaplan, Kristeva’s interpretation is an ahistorical one which reduces fascism to the status of an aberration which can be readily dissociated from an aesthetically radical modernist agenda.169 Instead, Kaplan wants an approach that places Céline’s writings in their historical context and pays closer attention to how the pamphlets were received and read in France when they were published. She points out that the fascist appreciation of Céline’s texts

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extended beyond their subject-matter to the syntax itself and she quotes from a review of Bagatelles pour un massacre written by the journalist Lucien Rebatet in 1938, in which he describes how he and his newspaper colleagues at Je Suis Partout performed collective readings of parts of the pamphlet. Rebatet writes: ‘let us read Céline in chorus … I want to make you hear … this joyous and formidable voice’.170 In 1938, Bagatelles pour un massacre existed not just as printed pages but also as a shared experience: the sound of the prose was celebrated as much as its content. Kristeva does not adduce the importance of Céline’s personal politics nor does she pay sufficient attention to the way in which his work was received. Stone is critical of Kristeva for engaging with a contagious text, for catching Céline’s right wing politics.171 Kaplan, on the other hand, is troubled by her failure to engage with the politics of the author and his contemporaries. Kaplan and Stone raise important questions about the relationship that exists between the writer and the written, the writer and the reader, and the reader and the written. For Stone, Céline is the source of a disease (fascist politics) for which his pamphlets are the means of transmission, retaining the potential to infect their readers. Kaplan, however, does not suggest that Kristeva has become contaminated by the politics of the pamphlets. She argues instead that Kristeva’s way of reading them is irresponsible precisely because she avoids engaging with those politics. For Stone, Céline and Destouches, author and individual, seem to be one and the same. Kaplan, by contrast, opens up the possibility that, whilst Destouches is tied to a historical moment, Céline is not. Céline can be read out of context. Kaplan sees this reading out of context as highly problematic although not without value. Meaning and morality Both Kaplan and Stone emphasize the importance of an attention to historical context in any reading of the pamphlets. This does seem to suggest that meaning is contingent. In any given text it is not something that is inherent and unchanging. Meaning shifts with the moment. A context is, of course, not itself inherent and unchanging, and indeed it can be argued that it too is authored. This would seem to privilege the reader as the locus of meaning. The reader decides the context within which the text should be read. The reader decides how the text will mean. This way of understanding texts calls for what might be termed a ‘contextual ethics’. The context Kristeva produces for her reading is identified as not sufficiently historical by Kaplan and Stone, hence it is an unethical one. Stone, however, does seem to hold out the possibility that the text contains something of the politics that produced it, that its politics transcend the

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historical moment within which it was produced. Its history is a part of it, not apart from it. Kristeva is seduced by the content of Céline’s writings. For Stone, crucially, she does not produce that content. Stone does not countenance the possibility that the pamphlets written in the name of Céline might not be fascist. This is either because Céline, as a fascist writing at a time when fascism was in the ascendancy, has permanently infected the words he used with his own political ideas, or because the words in the pamphlets have a particular and perpetual politics of their own. The author and his time have some authority or language is itself authoritative. The latter understanding would, for Foucault, be an example of the reintroduction of an author-function by a sleight of reading, in which ‘the empirical characteristics of the author’ are transposed into the text in the form of ‘a transcendental anonymity’.172 The words possess a unique hidden meaning if only you work hard enough to tease it out. Céline did not seem to believe in his own authority over what he wrote, professing fears about his inability to control the text he ‘authored’. In Bagatelles pour un massacre he writes of his fear that his work will be plagiarized: If my pulp fiction has any originality to it, sentimentally or stylistically, it will swiftly be stripped and swallowed by them … The Jews are really no good at the arts, it’s biological, and goes to the heart of their character.173 Céline is afraid that the body of his text will be consumed, that what he writes will be taken from him and incorporated into the work of others. He is frightened that the ‘Jews’ will steal from his own work to make up for their own lack of originality. As happens so often in the pamphlets, Céline is here projecting aspects of his own behaviour onto others. Kaplan has revealed that Bagatelles pour un massacre is ‘but a hastily compiled collection of references that lend the text an erudite veneer that is pure simulacrum’.174 The author has liberally stripped from the work of others to furnish his own text. His pamphlet is ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture’175. There is, however, a particularly marked emphasis on weaving the material written by Céline’s anti-Semitic literary precursors into the end product. His pamphlet is not his own. If the politics of the pamphlets exist in the words on the page then this politics precedes Céline. The writer is indeed only imitating ‘a gesture that is always anterior, never original’.176 This kind of understanding of writing seems to invite an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the author. Writing is unoriginal, the writer acts as conduit not creator. Céline is afraid

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that his work might be appropriated by another just as he has misappropriated other people’s writings. He does not explicitly express the concern that his work will cease to mean in the same way if it is ‘resited’ by someone else somewhere else but we can entertain the possibility that this is what is troubling him. This anxiety around appropriation will be returned to later. Kaplan also suggests that the style of the pamphlets is in fact integral to their ideology. It is the rhythm of the prose as much as its purport that gives the pamphlets their politics. Style is political, and the style of these pamphlets is one that is allied to fascism. She does not read the style as working to undermine the meaning. A putrid poetics If we accept that the style as well as the subject matter of the pamphlets is morally reprehensible, then does this mean that what we might call Céline’s ‘putrid poetics’ should be placed into permanent quarantine? Kaplan and Stone are critical of Kristeva because she is not condemnatory enough of the ideological content of the pamphlets. Is it therefore ethically sound to engage with a work like Bagatelles pour un massacre as long as the writer distances themselves from the politics of the work? Is commentary permissible if the requisite tone of disdain is maintained throughout, so long as it is made explicit that Céline’s politics are objectionable? Would this kind of reading be an ethically acceptable one? Or would this kind of reading merely help to fortify the fascist politics it seeks to censure? The citing of passages from Céline’s pamphlets within the context of a critical essay could be interpreted as providing a source of reinvigoration for those passages. The ‘critic reanimates’.177 Céline is still worth writing about, even in a negative sense. The condemnatory essay is always, in some measure, complicit with that which it seeks to castigate. It must repeat the writing it wishes to hold to account. The outright denunciation of the content of the pamphlets also sentences hundreds of pages of words to a singular meaning: proscribing the pamphlets as anti-Semitic and fascist serves to confirm them as such. The possibility that language might resist the politics it was intended to support is not entertained. Kaplan and Stone seek to preserve the pamphlets in their fascist context and thereby perpetuate that context. They do not consider the possibility that parts of the pamphlets could be made to mean differently if they were taken out of context. In her book Excitable Speech, Judith Butler describes how the contexts of the speech act are ‘never fully determined in advance’ and explains that

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there is always ‘the possibility for the speech act to take on a non-ordinary meaning, to function in contexts where it has not belonged’.178 Through the process of ‘reappropriation’ (the putting into play of the speech act in more favourable contexts) a negative term can undergo an affirmative resignification. In the final chapter of her book Bodies that Matter, Butler illustrates this process through a discussion of the term ‘queer’.179 Can what Butler writes about the performative be applied to Bagatelles pour un massacre? There is a big difference between a single term and several hundred pages of text. Céline himself, however, seemed troubled by the possibility of reappropriation. We might understand his reluctance to acknowledge his influences in Bagatelles pour un masscare, the silent citations throughout the pamphlet, as a manifestation of his desire to preserve the illusion of authority over language in his work. The hatred in the pamphlets which Kaplan and Stone accord such authority to, accumulates that ‘force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices’.180 Hatred exists as quotation. The hatred in the pamphlets succeeds because it draws upon the accumulated force of its previous expressions. Kaplan and Stone do nothing to challenge this cumulative power by their attitude. In Powers, Kristeva at least refuses to unquestioningly promulgate a politics of disapprobation through her desire to read the pamphlets outside of their usual context. She therefore instigates a rupture in the usually uninterrupted line of citational descent which lends Céline’s language its perceived power. Like speech acts, the written word is separated from its future effects by a gap. Kristeva works within this gap. She does not assume a position of sovereignty in relation to the pamphlets: the reader is not rendered master of meaning here. Kristeva exercises her agency within the constraints of a language which always already antecedes and constitutes her. Butler believes that agency begins where sovereignty wanes. ‘The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset’.181 The act of ‘reappropriation’ is not the birth of the sovereign reader. The reader who writes hate-speech out of context, who writes hatred in order to contest it, does not have ultimate control over the language they employ. This absence of control is part of the ‘subversive promise’ of agency.182 It is our ethical responsibility to make good this promise. There is, however, the matter of the pamphlets themselves …

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The matter of the pamphlets themselves Céline prohibited the republication of the pamphlets and his descendants have continued this interdiction.183 This voluntary suppression took place to prevent the pamphlets from continuing to cause harm after the war. Bagatelles pour un massacre sold well prior to this self-censorship, with Céline estimating that he earned 60,000 to 80,000 old francs in royalties from the pamphlet.184 Despite the fact that by the end of the war 75,000 copies of the work had been sold in France alone185, it is now difficult to find and gain access to the text. This has helped to contribute to its mythic status.186 The more the works are engaged with, the less the legend of their evil brilliance can continue to gain currency. In this sense, projects like those of Kaplan and Kristeva are both of value in that they contribute to the ongoing operation of debunking the fictions that surround Céline’s pamphlets. It would not, however, be sensible to advocate a reprinting of the pamphlets were it to become permissible, nor to find the quotation of parts of the works (in whatever context) entirely unproblematic. Little attention in any of the writings about the pamphlets is given to the materiality of these texts, the matter of the words themselves and the surface upon which they are inscribed, the printed page. To read the original pamphlets is a very different experience from reading about them. The dialogue between the reader and a copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre is one beyond words. The pamphlet exceeds the words that are only a part of it. The words are bounded by margins, floating above and between the yellowing papers upon which they were printed. The yellow paper, yellow, a colour ‘associated with degradation and discredit’ and also the colour associated with ageing.187 The pamphlets are growing old. The eyes that scan across the page register this discolouration, this sign of the paper in decline. The eyes see the broken corners of some pages. They note the insult of the white threads that bind the pages together, their unsettling appearance of newness. The fingers feel the textured and relatively thick paper. It is dry and fragile, fragments flake away. There is also a smell that accompanies their reading. It is a dry odour that bespeaks the maturity of the paper. At the moment, when Céline’s prose is read in its original type-setting, the pamphlets exist in and as a state of decay. They are crumbling to pieces. This experience of the pamphlets is lost when extracts from them are read in quotation. Citations from the pamphlets, in or out of what is perceived to be a suitable context, provide the prose with a renewal, a rejuvenation. This reveals the limitations inherent in transposing Butler’s ideas onto a text like Bagatelles pour un massacre. To cut any of the text from its musty paper and to paste it into a publication in the present is to smooth the wrinkles that bear

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testimony to its past. The print on this page, in its haecceity, in its here and nowness, obscures the original paper in its material now and thenness. Butler is sensitive to this problem of reinvigoration. The one who recites hate-speech is responsible for the manner in which that repetition is carried out.188 It would seem in this instance that the responsible act would be not to repeat Céline’s prose. Outside of the increasingly fragile pages of the pamphlets, the passages Céline composed or appropriated gain a new lease of life. It is true that they may be made to mean differently yet this attempt at reappropriation is also open to failure. The writer cannot control the response of the reader. The content of texts like those by Kaplan and Kristeva, which contain quotations from the pamphlets, may be deployed against the grain of the usage they were originally intended for (as a condemnation of fascism, or as an illustration of the psychic underpinnings of modern literature respectively) in the future. Any citations will always exceed the parameters set around their interpretation in the present. The act of quotation, the work of repetition, always entails a loss, something is invariably left behind. This loss is what occasions the potential for resistance in repetition. The loss is necessary for there to be any hope of change. This privation at the heart of repetition should therefore usually be understood as a positive characteristic. In the case of the pamphlets, however, perhaps the loss is greater than the gain. The material condition of the pages holds an important message, a historical value, which should not be sacrificed lightly. It should also be noted that it is not only the age of the prose that becomes buried in the action of citation. There are other forfeitures. The quotations from the pamphlets reproduced in books about Céline are likely to be unfaithful to the way the text they apparently simply reiterate actually appeared on the page. The technology of the printing press has advanced greatly since the 1930s and 1940s. In 1938 the mediation of the printing process, the gap between the writer and the reproduction of his or her writing, created a significant possibility for errors to occur. Error, emerging out of contingent events, can form a kind of resistance. The printing press is supposed to repeat the writer’s words, to replicate the same script over and over again, but there is always the potential for this process of reproduction to go astray. It is this straying from the typescript which is lost when Céline is cited in the present. Like an old record, Céline is cleaned up in quotation. The hiss of the original manuscripts, the unsettling, extraneous noise within their pages, is removed. The context within which the pamphlets were written was never one in which intention would be fulfilled by the end product. The pamphlets include interference that disrupts intent. In the copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre cited

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here, the printed characters on the page were often imperfect.189 The i would sometimes occur solely as a dot, or as a line without a dot. It was either a head without a body or a body without a head. Other letters also appeared in varying degrees of degradation. This damage was caused either by the incomplete inking of the plates during the printing process, as seems most likely, or just possibly by damage to the plates themselves. To give a sense of the scale of this partial printing, on page 326 (chosen at random) the letter i is damaged in the words ‘tennis,’ ‘civilisation,’ ‘parfait,’ ‘animale,’ ‘Juif,’ and ‘air’. On page 332 the end of two lines of text is missing, I underscore the missing sections: Quel théâtre pour cyclopes? … cent décors échelonnés, t­­___ plus grandioses … vers la mer … Mais il se glisse, piaule, piroue___190 The citing of Bagatelles pour un massacre in the present purifies the pamphlet excising these imperfections that are omnipresent in the original. To reproduce these incomplete passages as complete is to conceal what is a material manifestation of the gap that exists between intention and eventuality. There is an imperfect correspondence between what Céline wants to say and what is eventually said in Bagatelles pour un massacre. This resistance at the level of the matter of writing itself, the ink that refuses to collaborate with the author, is also lost when parts of the pamphlet are reprinted. An ethical reading of the work would be one which drew the reader’s attention to its physical condition (an elaboration of the contextual ethics mentioned earlier which extends it to encompass materiality as well). The pamphlets exist in the present but not as they did in the past. It is important to age them, to acknowledge the changed circumstances in which they are now read. It is also equally crucial to draw attention to the way the pamphlets undermine the message they are supposed to convey, but not at the level of style, rather through the very substance out of which they are made. The damaged i’s draw attention to the absence of the ‘I’ in the text, they figure the lack of authority within the writing. The typography assumes a kind of agency. Ink refuses to be limited by intention. This refusal, embodied in the matter of the print, matters because it highlights the possibility of refusal in general. The pamphlets are anti-Semitic, fascist, misogynist, and racist, but never perfectly so. The inconsistencies in the ink act as an invitation to a further contesting of the content, a rewriting of hate against itself. ‘Les jeux sont faits.’191

2 fascinating facture

Seen but not heard Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines) is one of Francis Bacon’s so called ‘Screaming Popes’. He produced the work along with a series of eight papal portraits in the summer of 1953.1 It is a picture that is at least partially concerned with aurality. The painting depicts the pope, who wears purple and white robes, seated on a gold-coloured throne. His mouth is open. He is, seemingly, in the act of screaming. Screams, as acoustic events, present a serious challenge to any artist seeking to depict them. This is because sound is always in transit, travelling across space and time. Painting likes to settle, to stop. How can a fixed medium incorporate motion? Paintings are histories of gestures. They do not appear to be gestural in themselves. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his essay Laocoon, interpreted the moderation he perceived to exist in the artist’s treatment of the expression of bodily pain in the famous sculpture as resulting from, amongst other things, the time constraints faced by the sculptor. He points out that whereas the poet does not have to ‘concentrate his picture upon a single moment’, the artist does.2 It is hard to make a single block of sculpted marble stand for an entire poem. It is difficult to fold the whole of a moving story into a single moment from that story. Sound also involves duration and would require a comparable condensation. A painting of a sound would need to be lasting but without length. Salvador Dalí painted perhaps the most well-known attempt to depict time passing, employing the motif of melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York). In the Study after Velázquez, Bacon’s timing of the image is of a different order. Movement is measured against the immobility of the Pope’s gaping maw. This black

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mouth-hole functions to foreground the dissolution of the body around it, a body that is losing its outline, a body becoming uncertain. As the mouth does act as a witness in the sense Gilles Deleuze understands it in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation: it works as a ‘gauge or a certification against which change is judged’.3 The mouth shows that the image is on the way. This is not an arrested outburst like the cry in Nicolas Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents (c1630, Musée Condé, Chantilly) so admired by Bacon. In Bacon’s painting, the motionless source of motion, the mouth, the hiatus, allows the rest of the paint to move, pushes the rest of the paint around. The technique is notably dissimilar to that employed by Edvard Munch in his well known cry, The Scream (1893, National Gallery, Oslo). In this crayon and tempera work, Munch tries to replicate sonorous vibrations through the use of concentric circles. Munch’s picture is, however, not uncertain enough. It is all sound and no fury. It is not a scream nor is it the representation of a scream. Just as, for different reasons, neither are those comic book depictions of screaming soldiers, the recourse to lettering, to a sub-Joycean attempt to write noise, the ‘Aaaaaaagh’ in a cartoonist’s speech-bubble. These examples are both mere illustrations whereas Bacon’s painting actually is a noise, performs noisiness. Munch’s painting is carefully bounded. The face of the homunculus, head shaped like a light-bulb, is an unbroken form, clearly distinct from the bridge and the water that form its backdrop. In contrast, Bacon’s style of painting is malerisch, loose brush-work, laissez-faire facture. It is a trying not to think in the way of the paint, to purify it, to shape it. The Pope’s outline is imperfect, punctured. The boundary between figure and ground is indistinct. The Pope is not so much misshapen as losing his shape. The scream is not delineated. It is shapeless. It is close to the noise out of which outline is extricated. Noise works against thinking. Arthur Schopenhauer complains in the section of Parerga and Paralipomena entitled ‘On Din and Noise’, about ‘the torture thinkers have to endure from noise’.4 He is particularly irritated by the noise of the cracking of whips which he writes of as: …this sudden sharp crack which paralyses the brain, tears and rends the thread of reflection and murders all thought, (which) must be painfully felt by anyone who carries anything in his head resembling an idea. All such cracks must, therefore, disturb hundreds in their mental activity, however humble its nature, but they shoot through a thinker’s meditations as painfully and fatally as the executioner’s axe cuts the head from the body.5

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Schopenhauer’s own account provides a prime example of shaping, of the transformation of noise into sense, whip-cracking as disturbance, distraction, diversion, interruption, whip-cracking named and described, thought about, thought through, made thought. In a similar way, although Bacon’s painting screams and aspires to be noisy art, the mobilization of the painting to perform a narrative function, to narrate the absence of narration in the image, acts to muffle its noise, to outline and subdue it. The description provided here demonstrates the violence of meaning making, the losses involved in any process of interpretation. It is impossible to catch this noise in language or perhaps all too easy to do so, to imprison it, to put it behind these bars that are letters and words. There is a want within interpretation that could be understood as the ceaseless desire to make sense (out) of noise. Here this desire manifests itself in the effort to forge the scream out of the word or the concept, to frame it and intern it, to write it, to travesty it. Interpretation is, however, always incomplete, there is always a hole within it through which that which is under interpretation escapes, a ‘something’ which is always unaccounted for. Noise is the hole. Michel Serres writes in Genesis about the noise of the possible: The noise is the opening. The Ancients were right to say of chaos that it gaped. The multiple is open, from it is born nature, which is always aborning. We cannot predict what will be born from it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there.6 On occasion, Bacon did not even try to predict what would emerge from the opening. His practice was one which fostered the unpredictable, the chance elements and occurrences in the application of paint. The ‘whip of white paint’ thrown onto the canvas at the last moment, which appears on the shoulder of the figure vomiting into a basin in Triptych May-June 1973 (1973, Private Collection), provides a good example of this.7 Bacon’s paintings are attempts to shake off meaning, to escape from shape. The phenomenon Ernst van Alphen has described as the loss of self that occurs to the spectator whilst looking at a painting by Francis Bacon might equally be understood as a loss of form or meaning.8 The spectator momentarily encounters pre-meaning, encounters an experience prior to their shaping into self. The self is not lost in this moment, it is left behind. Bacon’s paintings explore the noise and pain before the self, beneath the self.9 Study after Velázquez is a merging of experience, a coalescing of sensation, a whorl inward and backward.10 It is painful to look at and painful to listen to. Pain here describes the experience of losing shape, the anguish of moving

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towards a non-experience, of blurring boundaries. Elaine Scarry describes intense pain as world destroying.11 Painting in pain The world is full of sounds and shapes which make it signify. Pain, like intense pleasure, causes the disintegration of signification. You cannot know when you are in pain because you as a way of being in the world are paused. Pain becomes you, you fade into the background and the background out of which you originally emerged becomes foreground. In his essay on torture this is what Jean Améry called ‘self-negation’, when the ‘flesh becomes a total reality’.12 The person who is being tortured ‘is only a body, and nothing else beside that’.13 Pain is the blurring of mind and materiality. It causes thought – which so often thinks of itself, figures itself, as ethereal – to feel the weight of the matter. In Bacon’s Study after Velázquez, figuration (the shape giver) is in the process of giving way to flesh. The painting is not a depiction of flesh but a becoming flesh, the paint bleeds. This is what Michel Leiris meant when he described the possibility that a spectator who looks at Bacon’s works without preconceived ideas can experience ‘an order of flesh and blood reality similar to that which an ecstatic act like love-making touches in the everyday’.14 The spectator views Bacon’s paintings viscerally. It is an unthinking seeing. In her chapter on torture in The Body in Pain, Scarry reads the experience of pain as a movement towards an unwording. During a forced confession, the tormented prisoner reaches ‘aimlessly for the name of a person or place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its wordly referent’.15 Sometimes pain attains such a level of intensity that words are emptied of their meaning. The prisoner then speaks in husks. The confession in these circumstances forms part of a process of disintegration of signification, which ‘is a halfway point in the disintegration of language, an audible objectification of the proximity of silence, the torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words’.16 When viewed in these terms, Bacon’s art practice can be understood to be a confessional one. He is constantly trying to engineer a series of signs that are not in his hand, trying to make paint speak in tongues other than his own. The artist likes chance to speak in his stead, and says ‘if anything works for me, I feel it is nothing I have made myself, but something which chance has been able to give to me’.17 For Scarry it is only a particular kind of confession, the confession made under duress, which involves speaking as another. The prisoner who is tortured begins to speak for the regime rather than for herself or for himself

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because pain dissociates the prisoner’s voice from their self. It is possible, however, to think of all confessions as produced under some form of compulsion. Faith and morality, when they are cited as the incitement for a confession, might be construed as the internalized mechanisms of a more subtle and insidious method of torture. No confession is in our own voice because all confessions are effects of a power that always originates elsewhere. This allows us to read Bacon’s pursuit of chance, his conscious desire to paint by accident, as an attempt to break out of the internalized pressures that would otherwise shape his practice. He seeks to avoid confession made under duress. As power delimits the contours of the knowable this requires a journey into the dark, the unknown. Bacon’s paintings are an invitation into an outside of power although as will be discussed in the final chapter, to posit an outside to politics, a pre-political or parallel to the political, is fraught with difficulty. Scarry separates the body and the self in her analysis of torture. She believes torture is an amplification of an always already innate division between the two. Torture makes emphatic ‘the ever present but, except in the extremity of sickness and death, only latent distinction between a self and a body’.18 Speech and writing (which constitute language for Scarry) embody, or give shape to, the self, and allow it to break out of its corporeal confines.19 If you destroy voice or writing you absent the self making present what usually passes as unnoticed: the body. Painting is sometimes understood to be a form of writing. In this sense, Study after Velázquez can be seen as painting as unwriting. The handling of the work is tortured. It is therefore reminiscent of the signature Guy Fawkes appended to his final confession. It forms a chilling example of writing losing its shape, moving towards unreadability, towards the dubious freedom of illegibility. Fawkes’s final signature (and there are several signed confessions so it is possible to track the deterioration in his writing) is writing within pain, writing wherein the boundaries between signs are collapsing. Pain disturbs contours. It is a violent making of, or taking to, noise. Jacques Attali writes that ‘to make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill’.20 Intense pain interrupts shape, disrupts signification by pushing signs into each other. Signs need space. In great pain the world becomes too small to accommodate them. Agony is this pain. The agonized experiences a pain beyond pain, beyond language. The word ‘pain’ cannot register this feeling. It is unwordable. The word ‘pain’ is opaque. It obscures the event it designates. Words are above things, they are the destructive lacquer that is required in order to make mean. Pain is the return of the underwork. It is sensation outside sense. Sense-making is the forging of an experience into something other than itself through its interpretation. Pain

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cannot be interpreted, it is. The word fakes it because great hurt cannot be communicated. As Jean Améry explained, ‘if someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be forced to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself ’.21 The words would need to cut the reader to carry the experience of torture. Even if the words are bypassed and the pain is physically induced this might not succeed. To impart is to make known and great pain is not known but, rather, is become. The one in pain, most intimate with pain, is known by pain, rather than knows pain. The tortured person, for whom the body has become all encompassing, has a body without signification. It is not a body as we understand our bodies. It is not a body the experience of which is mediated by discourse. It is not a body opposed to, and yet reliant upon, the self. It is a body outside. The tortured body is not even a body forced to resist in the sense that Foucault conceives of resistance in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. It is here that Foucault writes the oft cited words, ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, and the less often sighted ‘and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’.22 For Foucault, power is always located in relations. In a Foucaultian sense then, in the context of torture, power does not reside in the person who tortures but in their relation to the person tortured. Power exists in connections, it is never isolated. It is also connected, it is coupled to resistance. The body in intense pain produces a situation in which there is no resistance. The body in agony is not relational. William Haver has suggested that ‘entirely other than a subject, flesh in the plenitude of the pain that supplants every possible ontology is utter singularity, nothing but its ‘ownmost’ non-relationality’.23 In this situation the body is all, hence it is nothing. The knowable is a realm of relations. It is a place of spaces which open up the possibility of connections between things. We know through the space between knowing and not knowing. The non-relational is outside knowing and not-knowing. Interpretation also requires the relational. The one in intense pain transcends experience because experience is always already an interpretation. Intense pain surpasses the interpretative capacity. This folding inwards (the collapsing of any and all relations) that occurs in instances of extreme torture causes the one in pain to move outside power. Power requires space, in the absence of space there can be no power, there can be no master and bondsman. As Jacques Lacan has pointed out, pain has a complex character. It is ‘an intermediary between afferent and efferent’.24 Pain moves between the inward and the outward. Scarry has written of Bacon’s pictures of solitary figures that they are ‘turned inside out, revealing the most inward and secret parts’.25 This

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is true not just of what is depicted but also of the spectator who frequently sees with their stomach and is revulsed by the works.26 The paintings bring the body of the beholder, their queasy interior, back to them. The works also literally show inside becoming outside. In Study after Velázquez the inside of the body is externalized by the scream. In his essay Mouth, Georges Bataille wrote of the overwhelmed individual who throws back their head that they appear as if ‘explosive impulses were (going) to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams’.27 The scream disembodies. It throws the body outside its contours, makes the inside outside.28 It is a voiding of space. Noise This collapsing of boundaries embodied by the scream is accompanied by a crisis of signification. The sign disintegrates as V.N. Vološinov recognized in his description of the ‘animal cry’. Vološinov wrote that ‘the animal cry, the pure response to pain in the organism, is bereft of accent; it is a purely natural phenomenon. For such a cry, the social atmosphere is irrelevant, and therefore it does not contain even the germ of the sign formation’.29 It is something exterior to ideology and outside the shape of the sign. It is the outing of the inner. It is an intermediary between the insides and the outside, yet it also exceeds intermediation. It is neither inside nor outside, nor is it both inside and outside, it is beyond inside and outside. It is the ‘beyondof-the-signified’30 from out of which the signified emerged. Lacan calls it the Thing, das Ding. It could also be referred to as noise. Lacan wrote that the Thing is inaccessible to us, that is has always been inaccessible.31 It can never be known. The self has no memory of this before self which persists around and beneath it. The before is the noise from which the self figures itself out. It lines the outline. It is the surround to shapes. It is the paper beneath the type. Attali understands noise to be a formless form of interruption that initiates change through its powers of censorship, through its capacity to annul the existing meanings of a given moment and open up a meaningless field out of which to create ‘a new order on another level of organization’.32 Babies exist in and as noise before they are born, encompassed by and being the roar of bodily functions. This clamour continues after birth. Didier Anzieu suggests that the alimentary and digestive activities ‘turn the body into a resonant cavern whose noises are all the more disquieting for the baby since they cannot be localized’.33 Anzieu is correct to emphasize the nonlocalizability of this noise. Noise comes from everywhere and nowhere. It

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does not originate. Origin arises from noise. Noise and sound as discrete phenomena, as different things, emerge from the undifferentiated Thing that is noise. It is the Thing before the two. Outside inside and outside, beyond closeness and distance, it is extimacy.34 Noise is the intimate unknowable that gives the self its edge and puts it on edge. The closest we come to noise is through the abject, that which ‘lies there quite close’ but ‘cannot be assimilated’.35 Julia Kristeva understands the abject to be that which we banish in order to be, that which, from its no-place of banishment beseeches ‘a crying out’.36 She explains that in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline the ‘narrative yields to a “crying-out theme” that, when it tends to coincide with the incandescent states of boundary-subjectivity that I have called abjection, is the crying-out theme of suffering-horror’.37 The theme of suffering-horror is ‘the ultimate evidence of (…) states of abjection within a narrative representation’.38 This crying-out theme of suffering-horror is the scream in Study after Velázquez. It is the pain of the desire to touch the untouchable. It is the knowledge of the impossibility of fulfilling this desire. It is the wanting. Abjection, if not noise, is perhaps on the path back to noise. It is the experience of an unsound self, the experience of losing experience, of losing the shape that is an experience, of almost attaining the non-experience of unbecoming. It is a falling back towards the annihilation of self but a not quite arriving there. The abject is not the objet petit a, nor is it an object, it is a border.39 It is the border between the I and that which was before it. It is the brink of the I’s history. The abject marks the moment when an I ‘that is taking shape is constantly straying’.40 The abject is the hinge. It forms the process of separation. It is not an afterwards but comprises of a ‘during’. It is, as discussed previously, the requisite rejection for recognition to take place. Abjection is before the time of mirrors; acoustic, visual or otherwise.41 It is the precondition without which no identification with an Other can take place. Abjection is a tenuous shaping that permits the self to take shape in an outside of itself. It is simultaneously the rejection of senseless noise and the seeking out of signs. The actions of mewling and puking in its mother’s arms form the beginning of the infant’s journey towards an outside of the mother Thing. By screaming, the infant expels a part of itself from the confines of the maternal embrace. Screaming is a kind of shitting out (be that of fear, or of self ). Mikhail Bakhtin writes that the gaping mouth is ‘related to the lower stratum; it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily underworld’.42 The screaming mouth is a second anus. In the beginning there is the scream out of which ‘screams’ emerge, in the beginning there is the pain from which ‘pains’ arise. In the beginning there is noise. Noise is the background to self

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and sense. Perception and its objects issue from the noise and through their issuance muffle it. In the beginning, we retch and wrench ourselves out of this noise. The nausea within noise, the gagging and vomiting, starts to pull us out of noise, or push noise out of us. Pulling and pushing, oppositions, separations – provisional at first but then fastening as experiences – slowly become sounds. The screaming baby is carrying out an exhaustive disgorging of noise.43 It is propelling noise outside the outside, abjecting it. Study after Velázquez is an attempt to attend to these early processes by which self is extricated from out of the noise. The scream is the first and, sometimes, a final sound. It is a frontier of the self.44 The screaming Pope tracks sounds back to the edge of noise and then seeks to go further: from mis-shaping to unshaping. The whips of red paint, streaks which stand out against the white of the papal surplice, are interruptions in shape. These blood red spatters appear to have been thrown onto the canvas like the ‘whip of white paint’ in Triptych, May–June 1973. They seem to be after-thoughts, outside-thoughts. They are openings to what cannot be thought. These weals of paint flay the I. The ‘real murderer of ideas is only the crack of a whip. It is meant to crush every good moment for meditation which anyone may at times have’.45 The sting of the lash breaks shape, ruptures reason. It opens the eye to the possibility of seeing something which cannot be seen, of hearing something which cannot be heard, of thinking something beyond thought, the possibility of an unthinking.46 The painting shocks. It is traumatic, it wounds. Julia Kristeva asserts that Céline’s effect is to call up within the reader, ‘a nakedness, a forlornness, a sense of having had it, discomfort, a downfall, a wound’.47 Bacon might be said to call up a similar wound. Study after Velásquez breaks the skin, the spectator’s cutaneous contour, and opens inside to outside. Bacon’s blurred and besmeared figures and faces form a collapsing of boundaries. It is useful to return to Munch’s The Scream here. Fredric Jameson reads the drawing as a demonstration of the limits of visual representation, a depiction of the impossibility of any artist’s efforts at self-expression. The inside can never become outside. For Munch the picture is the ‘desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling’.48 He is seeking to substantiate sensations. Distemper and pastel become vehicles through which Munch seeks to exteriorize his inner-pain. This effort to carry distress from within to without is an unsuccessful one. Jameson believes that the failure of self-expression is underscored by the gestural content: ‘since the realm of the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are incompatible with its medium’.49 It is impossible to hear a picture. For Jameson, artist should never mix the seen and the sounded. The gaze is deaf.

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Jameson reads Expressionism against Pop art, believing that contemporary artists work in the realization that the brush is not a bridge between the artist’s emotions and the canvas but rather an unbridgeable gap. Munch’s picture does, however, also acknowledge rupture of a kind. The Scream contains a breakdown in visual sense. Hidden behind the twisted torso of the homunculus there is an impossible gap in the railings of the bridge. There is a hidden fracture that unbalances the image. The lines of the rails on either side of the figure are not aligned. They are reminiscent of the impossible horizons in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c1504, Louvre, Paris). The rails should form a coherent narrative, from foreground to background, for the reading I but there is mismatch instead. The gap in the railings introduces an interference into the image and what it relates. Things do not quite add up. They do not make sense. Journey into the night Bacon chided narrative interpretations of his own work but they are, of course, inescapable. The narrative in Study after Velásquez is, however, interrupted. This makes it similar to Munch’s The Scream. This narrative is challenged: ‘its linearity is shattered, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts, incompletion, tangles, and cuts’.50 The screaming Pope becomes incoherent because of the syntax, or lack of it, the disordered brushstrokes. This is an abject painting, one in which the ‘limit between inside and outside’ has become uncertain.51 The application of the paint is a violent one. The impasto white of the papal robe and the thick brushwork of the yellow throne (perhaps it should be described as a box), manifest the effort expended in the production of the picture. The artist always used the rough side of the canvas, which makes the way he pulls broad strokes of paint across distance all the more impressive. The canvas must literally have been pummelled to apply the pigment in this way. It is not just the form the brushstrokes take, however, but also the sequencing of their application, which brings the abject to be in the portrait. A painting like Willem de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle (1952-53, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) might be regarded as similar in the way that broad bands of paint are made to travel across a great expanse of canvas but the American artist’s technique differs in that it only depicts rather than enacts. De Kooning paints a figure already in fragments, an already made broken person. Bacon paints his Pope in such a way as to make and break him at the same time. It is this difference which prevents works such as de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle from ever aspiring to a revolutionary

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painterly poetic. De Kooning’s woman is not broken because she was already broken. He painted her after the event of her fracturing and fissuring. Bacon’s Study after Velásquez, however, is an event of breaking, which is what gives it a poetic quality (if poetry is understood to be narrative that is pulverized). Bacon’s works are in process rather than after the fact. They show faces, figures, forms, in dissolution not after their dissolution. In a painting such as Study after Velásquez, poetry becomes a process of breaking apart the medium’s story-telling capacity even if that breaking apart must of necessity create another narrative by way of this very action. This second-order narrative born from out of storytelling’s own death forever taunts poetry’s claim to independence. Bacon seems to have painted a screaming pope and then to have begun to obliterate the image through the use of vertical black lines which cut through the existing figure. It is the creation and then destruction of a representation. It is narrative collapsed into poetry. This story of the creation of the painting is, however, too simplistic. The effect of a curtain which ostensibly falls across and obscures the image is more complex. The curtain which appears to have been painted on top of the figure of the pope is, in fact, at times actually behind him. Some of the curtain appears to have been painted before the pope, and some after. Bacon scores his screaming Pope with black brushstrokes in a process which should reintroduce a form of narrative. Any narrative is, however, made uncertain. The screaming Pope is never able to become the coherent representation, the consistent narrative, which would constitute the mending of a poetic breaking. Those purportedly liberating, destructive downward sweeps of dark colour seemingly travel sometimes behind and sometimes across the figure of the pontiff and as much constitute as deny him. Poetry emerges in this uncertain process of description. The poetic is not superseded by narrative at this point. Bacon breaks up the operation of breaking up. The recognition of this deceptive technical practice is of course the introduction of a narrative once again, but Bacon has pushed storytelling back another level and may therefore lay claim to being one of the most poetic of painters. His is a revolutionary poetic painting which has important effects on the spectator at the level of subjectivity. Like Céline’s poetic-prose, Bacon’s paintings invite a journey back towards the psyche’s beginnings, a journey into the night. In their pioneering article, ‘“Seeing the Story of One’s Time”: Appropriations from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens suggest that Bacon’s works provide a glimpse of ‘the will to power and sadistic violence lurking beneath the veneer of political ritual that pervaded public life in Nazi Germany’.52 They focus on the significance of Nazi imagery as source

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material for the artist and suggest that Bacon transforms this imagery in his paintings in ways which permit the brutality beneath the stage-managed veneer of benevolence crafted by National Socialism to be revealed. Hammer and Stephens are, however, unwilling to push their analysis of Bacon’s interest in the Nazis further. The fact that Bacon may have found the fascists alluring is briefly acknowledged because of the artist’s interest in sadomasochism but then, as quickly, all but discounted.53 There seems, however, a strong affinity between Bacon’s artistic technique and Céline’s literary style. The two men both purge violent impulses through the creation of their works. Hammer and Stephens are unable to contemplate the way both Bacon and the National Socialists testify in their different ways to the same ‘power of fascination’ that is abjection.54 This is because their analysis rests upon analysing the subject-matter of the artist’s works. Scant attention is given to how Bacon’s style relates to his iconography. Bacon resembles Céline in that he is drawn to horrible subjects. Like the writer, he also draws those who encounter his works to the horror that underlies the self. It is by tapping into this horror that Bacon is able to see the story of his time. It is the story of how extreme politics can come to exploit the void left by the collapse of organized religion (which previously provided the social mechanisms necessary to police the abject). As with Céline, Bacon shows how the abject, the anxiety it generates, is now exploited by fascism to legitimate its power and also the violence that accompanies it. The painter, like the novelist, creates works which are rooted in the same psychic material. Bacon also creates a ‘daring X-ray of the “drive foundations” of fascism’.55 These drive foundations are not embodied in the artist’s subject-matter but are, rather, enacted through his style. Bacon’s paintings, through their facture, occasionally twist the symbolic so that the picture plane develops spaces of semiotic intensity, places where the surface fractures and the semiotic bleeds through. It is a giving of the flesh back to language. The action of language is usually that of negation, a repression of this somatic underside. Bacon’s paintings, however, insist on the body’s place within language. This body must be travelled to through an extended contemplation, a deepening appreciation, of the complex figure-ground relationships, chromatics and textures of the painter’s works. The semiotic is witnessed only after a specular journey back into the night out of which ‘I’ became. It is an instant of impossible witnessing in which the I sees the before I. The narrative that is the narration of narrative’s end, the second-order narrative described earlier, is also the recounting of a voyage beneath and behind the symbolic. Here the semiotic, the noise, is discovered. In this context, Deleuze’s description of painting as hysteria is particularly interesting:

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Freeing line and colour from representation, it also liberates the eye from its belonging to a body, it frees it from its quality of fixity and function: the eye becomes, to all intents and purposes, an indeterminate and varied organ, which sees the body without organs, meaning the Figure, as pure presence. Painting gives us eyes everywhere: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the picture breathes).56 Painting separates seeing from the organ of sight or liberates the organ of sight from its containment by the eye. Deleuze is describing an abject art practice. We could read the organs of the body, as they are named and separated, shaped, to be on the side of the symbolic. This corporeal cartography is gifted to the self by the mother who shapes the infant body’s boundaries. The body without organs is the body without borders. Bacon’s paintings do not signify in the usual sense but show instead.57 The ‘gagging sensation’ and ‘spasms in the stomach’ which Kristeva cites as forming part of the experience of abjection should be conceived of as a seeing with the stomach and the throat.58 Before the eye, we see with our body. This pressing into consciousness of the corporeal aspect of language, this bringing of perception back to the body, will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

3 BACKGROUND NOISE

If his is a message, it gets lost in the “background noise”: it is not a communication, it is not a language, or at most it is a dark and truncated language precisely like that of a person who is about to die and is alone, as we will all be at the point of death. Primo Levi1 Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems. Theodor W. Adorno2

Exiled breath A possible musical equivalent to Bacon’s pictorial practice might be thought to comprise of the work of the singer and performance artist Diamanda Galás. Her albums such as SchreiX (1996) and Plague Mass (1991), which were partly composed in response to the moral turpitude of the Catholic Church as manifested by their response to the AIDS pandemic, are punctuated by screams. As is Galás’s most recent work, Defixiones (2003), which has examined different subject matter, seeking to draw attention to the Armenian genocide. Her vocal methods parallel Bacon’s approach to painting in many ways. The singer’s use of the echo which she distorts, acts to catalogue the beginnings of a disintegration of self. Galás often uses language as a point of stasis against which to gauge change. Recognizable words are distended and distorted until they dissolve into screams or growls. This process is then

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repeated over and over again with the word continually called back to register its own destruction. The obliteration of these words is the only way to undo the losses their very coming into existence has entailed. Their annihilation reveals the acoustic potentials, culturally disavowed vocalizations, we possess but which are usually repressed: sounds of pain and violence, death knells. Galás’s vocals expose the underside of words through a technique of misshaping them, opening them out, extending them until they are emptied of sense, eviscerated. Unshaping is the ultimate aim. Galás guts meaning, turning words back into noise, making them the guttural, giving the voice back its materiality. She is acutely aware of the power which lies beneath the symbolic, the behind to words: The voice is the primary vehicle of expression that transforms thought into sounds, thought into message. And beyond the words (with all due respect to them), the combinations of vocal and verbal energy can be overwhelming.3 The voice shapes words which, in their turn, are contours for thought. Speech nurtures and supports words and the ideas behind and inside them. The voice, as provider of expression, is the product of a complex physical process, formed by air expelled from the lungs, pushed up the trachea into the larynx, impelled through the vocal folds, where it is then sculpted by the pharynx and the motions of the jaw, the tongue and the lips. To speak is to drive breath through flesh, to press it against flesh, to compel it to sound, to become voice, by way of the matter of the body. The voice is outlined by the mouth and then cast out. It is exiled air. Spoken words, sung words, wordless vocalizations, fall from the lips, banished cadences, seeking solace in the ear or upon the skin of the speaker or of another. These wandering sound waves break against the pinnae, seething into the inner ears, or against the skin, flowing back into flesh. The voice, as a series of compressions and rarefactions of air across space, literally touches the listener. The arrival of the voice is felt by the ear and, less frequently, by the skin (the closely whispered words of a lover or confidante kindle the ear and neck). Through her astute usage of available technology Galás has exploited the tangibility of the voice (its materiality) in her stage performances.4 She uses ‘high frequencies [that] really fuck people up’.5 This frequency fucking is achieved through ‘a specialized high-pass EQ’ or tone control, which bypasses the ‘mid- and low-frequencies, thus accentuating the higher registers’.6 It works to generate a shrill sound. Galás’s voice can often be piercing. Its grain pricks the ear. Her keening tongue is razor-sharp. The singer also describes

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doing ‘spatial manipulations of the sound into a quadraphonic sound system’, using four speakers which place the audience ‘in my cage’.7 The bars of this acoustic prison are made of sound, of music, of voice. The quadraphonic system is designed to subject the crowd to the rack of conscience. Through it the audience is surrounded by sound, hemmed in by it, pressed by it. The press was the apparatus once used to inflict the torture of peine forte et dure (severe and hard punishment) upon those who refused to plead, to acknowledge their guilt. In her live performances Galás sometimes constructs an auditory enclosure through her use of the quadraphonic sound system which envelops her audience.8 This mapping and positioning of listener by sounds can then be disturbed by the muting of one or more of the speakers. Much of the music has a distinct temporality. It is reminiscent of the reverberations within Gregorian chant where each verse overlays the still sounding words of the last.9 There is often an echo in Galás, causing the listener to imagine they are hearing something projected into a cavernous space (the work Plague Mass was in fact performed in a cathedral). This echo will then disappear, oversounded by another lament or a piercing cry. The temporality in this vocal technique has the character of a palimpsest: there is an interweaving of past and present vocalizations such that the before becomes a part of the now. This compression of time denies any simple description of the temporality as linear. Nor is this cyclical time, or the monumental time ‘without cleavage or escape’10 that haunts all subjectivity. The listener hears the rhythms out of which linear time eventually emerges. The mirror-phase provides the moment when time begins to move forward. Lacan describes this phase as a drama ‘whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation’.11 The child’s entry into a state of anticipation suggests the beginnings of a sense of futurity for it. The mirror-phase does not solely bring the child outside of itself but also outside of the eternal present of maternal plenitude and into an infantile sense of linear time. Galás creates an acoustic mirror that enables her listeners to hear echoes of their early psychic life. In this sense, she creates a space in which her addressees are returned to the auditory sphere of their infancy which is constructed of the maternal rather than paternal voice.12 In the blood Galás often calls her audience to account – both acoustically and visually – confronting them with the reality of bodies rendered abject by social injunction, bodies made not to matter, bodies marginalized, bodies with AIDS, ‘insane’ bodies, open, desiring bodies, bodies often labeled as inappropriate

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and improper. In Plague Mass, for example, performed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in October 1990, Galás, who had stripped to the waist, covered ‘herself with ceremonial blood’.13 Throughout the performance the singer brought the inner life of the body, its breath and fluids, outside, as voice, as spit, and as blood-sheen or cruor. The sight of Galás as a coruscating exhortation was, perhaps, almost as important as her sound. In the words of Susan McClary, Galás ‘enacts her pieces upon her own body’.14 In Plague Mass the body was revealed in its visceral reality, its insides exposed not just through the voice but also visually by way of an act of gory baptism. The body is both the sounding-board for the song and its substance, the means and the meaning. Singing has always been a bloody art. Lotte Lehmann advised young singers that songs ‘must soar from the warm, pulsing beat of [their] own heart’.15 The heart is the transport of the voice, fuelled by the vena cava carrying blood to it, fuelling through the aorta carrying blood away from it. Its pulsing pressures sounds into being. The heart sings. It is the anvil where the beginnings of the voice are beaten and shaped. Sound is cast here long before it reaches the incus. Through an act of transubstantiation within the body, blood becomes voice. The voice is another artery. The veins of the singer strain to sustain it. Galás chose to title one of her works Vena Cava and the significance of blood for the singer is well known. It is important for Galás for many different reasons but it is perhaps its loss, the issue of haemorrhaging, of rupture, of seepage, of spill, which is the most disturbing of these. The subject of the body in dissolution, the body in pain, the horrible body, a lacerated and leaking body, forms a frequent point of reference. Galás does not shy from horror, her work confronts it, embodies it. She also faces up to the danger that her work might aestheticize the horror: that art opens up ‘the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed’ from a limit experiences and that it can become ‘transfigured, something of its horror removed’.16 The works by Galás that explore such experiences do not succumb to this threat of beautification because they become horror rather than describing horror. It is a becoming that can be understood as a response to the dangers of seductive rhetoric, of artfully-crafted speech. In markedly different ways both Theodor W. Adorno and Galás have voiced their mistrust for a particular kind of rhetoric; a rhetoric imbued with totalitarian tonality, with the persuasive pitch that leaves listeners with ‘only one option’, which is ‘to identify with the aggressor’.17 Hearing a recording of Adorno speaking (which is different from listening to Adorno18) is a dull experience. His voice is flat, monotone. His words lack modulation. He makes no use of the many ruses used by the accomplished public speaker to seduce an audience

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and sustain their interest. It is therefore tempting to read Adorno’s voice as symptomatic of the philosopher’s mistrust of the voice in general because of its potential for misuse. As Anne Karpf has pointed out, the harangues of Adolf Hitler were carefully calculated and controlled so as to communicate his excitement to an audience as successfully as possible.19 It is this excitement that Adorno refuses to voice. He pares the drives, the excitation, from his speech. Kristeva has, as already mentioned, described the drive foundations of fascism as existing ‘at the doors of the feminine, at the doors of abjection’.20 Heavily drive-invested speech is heavily feminine speech. It is speech which engages the semiotic aspect of language: the reverberations, rhythms and tones reminiscent of the early involvements of mother and child. Hitler’s rants were heavily driveinvested, their emotional tenor (forceful, hateful, hysterical) the product of the semiotic. This way of speaking, this raucous style, became ‘so identified with tyranny and genocide that never again would it find favour’.21 In his hate-filled tirades, Hitler spoke towards abjection in ways that echo LouisFerdinand Céline’s writing towards it and Bacon’s painting towards it. The languages of Céline and Hitler both share the same horrific fantasmatic structure, embody the same psychic drama, which is ‘projected onto the other, and then played out by the culture at large’.22 Hitler, however, never quite let go of the symbolic, his oratory was carefully balanced, measured, whereas Céline’s writings and Bacon’s paintings writhe in semiotic excess. Horror incarnate To explain what differentiates the songs of Galás from the writings of someone like Céline or the paintings of someone like Bacon (despite an ostensibly shared concern with abjection), it is useful to turn to the poetry of Paul Celan. Celan, whose poem Todesfuge Galás recites as part of the work Defixiones, Will and Testament, formed one of the ‘others’ labelled as abject by National Socialism, his was a body that ceased to matter to society, was marginalized, persecuted. In popular mythology it is believed that it was Celan’s Todesfuge which prompted Adorno to state that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.23 Here, however, it is some of Celan’s late works which will initially be considered. It was these final poems which Primo Levi referred to in his essay ‘On Obscure Writing’, contrasting their ‘atrocious chaos without a glimmer of light’ with the ‘raw lucidity’ of Todesfuge.24 Levi described their darkness growing ‘from page to page until the last inarticulate babble consternates like the rattle of a dying man, and in fact that is just what it is’.25 The poetry forms a kind of death in life. It is composed of versed agonies, of

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language in its final throes. Levi does not approve of this painful incoherence. He writes that it ‘attracts us as chasms attract us, but at the same time it also defrauds us of something that should have been said and was not, and so it frustrates and turns us away’.26 Levi believed that writing that sought to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust should strive for clarity. For him, as Hayden White has stated, style was ‘an ethical issue’.27 He praised objectivity and urged purging witness testimony of any rhetorical excess. It could be surmised that he wanted people to write as Adorno spoke, without blandishment. Levi was not, however, immune to beautiful turns of phrase as his remarks on Celan, even in translation, testify to. Indeed White’s interest in Levi stems very much from the fact that his ‘writing is consistently (and brilliantly) figurative throughout’.28 Levi is a master of aesthetically-pleasing metaphors. It is therefore possible to suggest that Levi’s prose is too sensuous, too pleasurable to read, given the horrors which it seeks to communicate. Celan’s late poems and Galás’s exploration of limit experiences through song do not, however, suffer from this problem. This is because their works perform a kind of disfiguring. The figure, the trope, the carrier of sense, the provider of outline, falters in their works. Meaning fades. It is only through such an undoing of the figure, through a compression of language which causes the boundaries between units of sense to dissolve, that horror can truly be accessed. It is a loss of outline. It is the destruction of the maternal and paternal figures that are psychically necessary for the constitution of a self. The death-world of the Nazi concentration camps, the appalling massacres that took place during the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides (which are also attested to in Defixiones), each constituted a gap in linguistic experience for those caught up within them because these events formed an assault on the self. The drawing into being of meaning, the archaic tracing of borders that forms the psychic process known as abjection and constitutes an initial, provisional sense of self and other, is placed under erasure by traumatic experience. The primal mapping carried out by the mother is undone. In the midst of unmitigated repugnance, the self ’s capacity to abject threatening reminders of its figurative nature breaks down, fails. Abjection, as a process of casting out, of separation, gives us our first sense of an outline, of there being an I, a beyond to the Mother, another. This Mother becomes the abject in order to facilitate this process. In everyday existence we are reminded of the initial act of expulsion that forges our sense of separateness by all those things that pose a potential threat to our sense of distinct boundaries, of secure insides and outsides. We therefore turn away from such things, limiting our interaction with them, policing their presence

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in our world. The policing of contact with the abject is, however, rendered impossible by many extreme situations. If the self is surrounded at every turn by horror and death then the protective mechanism that is abjection is overwhelmed. In times like this the self collapses, becomes the abject. This collapse will be explored further in subsequent chapters. It is described in graphic terms by Robert Antelme in his account of his experiences at Gandersheim: There’s blood on my shirt, there’s blood on my chest, which is red from scratched bites; scabs are starting to form, I pull them off, and they bleed. I can’t stand it any longer; I’m going to scream. I’m nothing but shit. It’s true: I’m just a piece of shit.29 Antelme’s scream is also voiced by Galás. Her work, like Celan’s last poems, dwells in the abject, she sings from within the horror of a violently enforced alterity. By contrast, Céline writes and Bacon paints towards the abject. They write from outside it whereas Celan and Galás write from within. They inhabit the effects of fascism. Their work unfolds inside symbolic collapse. Bacon and Céline, by contrast, master the break in the symbolic function which they ostensibly invite. Céline accomplishes this through his use of ‘literary devices and writing style’.30 Bacon does it through his carefully constructed facture, his pictorial style. Celan and Galás refuse to use style in this way choosing instead to operate within the break. Céline produces hate-filled writings that draw on the power of horror for their inspiration whilst Celan and Galás demonstrate the results of this hatred, of these assaults upon the body of an Other. This may explain their continual desire to assert the materiality of the body through their works. The limit experiences they describe each reduce the participants to a status as body and nothing more. In several poems, Celan demonstrates similar concerns with blood and with incised bodies to those of Galás.31 During Nah, im Aortenbogen, for example, he writes of the aorta, of coronary arteries, of light-blood.32 The poem Alle die Schlafgestalten refers to the ‘slit-arteries’ of the poet’s cognition.33 The strength of Celan’s and Galás’s art, what makes their works so remarkable, is this ability to disfigure the body, to return to the unsound body before it is defaced, veiled by sense. The two artists reveal the matter of the body that lies behind its culturally-constructed contours. This materiality is the stuff beneath the culturally-coded figure. It is the fact of the flesh. In one of his poems Paul Celan invites the reader to ‘hör dich ein mit dem Mund’ or ‘listen your way in with your mouth’.34 The orifice that shapes speech and produces sound now also receives and interprets it. It becomes a mouth-ear. At this moment it is as if Celan is inviting the reader to taste

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or touch language. There is an element of synaesthesia present in the verse. Synaesthesia is defined in clinical terms as occurring ‘when stimulation of one sensory modality automatically triggers a perception in a second modality, in the absence of any direct stimulation to this second modality’.35 Celan seems to suggest that the taste of the words in the mouth or the feel of their enunciation through the tongue and the teeth can stimulate the ear. What Celan has actually recognized, however, is that the separation of the senses is artificial. He may have been influenced by Martin Heidegger here as he was certainly familiar with some of the philosopher’s writings on Hölderlin.36 Heidegger had said that ‘only because the bodily organs, mouth and ear, differ in how they look, and are situated in different places of the body, do we separate saying and hearing into two separate faculties and thereby overlook the original unity of both, which nevertheless first of all sustains the very possibility of their interelation’.37 The senses are shapes that arise from out of the mass, the amorphous mess, of non-sense that is noise. Synaesthesia is experienced by those who have only learnt to achieve a partial shaping of sensations. Richard E. Cytowic has suggested that perception might be ‘like sculpting from a block of marble, exposing the statue within it by removing extraneous bits’.38 The block of marble is noise. Michelangelo’s Slaves, unfinished tomb figures, can thus, for example, be read as on the path to sound, as shapes in process.39 Celan’s late poems seek to fold the senses back into each other, to push the statue back into the marble, to forego figuration in favour of presence, the presence of noise. It is for this reason that when Levi chooses to condemn Celan’s poetry he describes it as noise. Levi writes of the poet’s work that the message ‘gets lost in the “background noise”: it is not a communication, it is not a language, or at most it is a dark and truncated language precisely like that of a person who is about to die and is alone, as we will all be at the point of death’.40 It is, however, this background noise, this bodily beneath to communication, which becomes foreground in times of atrocity. Celan and Galás open us to the horror of abject embodiment in a way that the measured prose and metaphors of Levi cannot. Galás differentiates her artistic practice from that of a popular entertainer in the following terms, ‘most pop music is descriptive; it’s about the thing, not the thing itself. Whereas my work is the thing itself, it is the sound of the plague, the sound of the emotions involved’.41 To read Celan, to hear Galás, is not to encounter a description of horror but to experience a noisy embodiment of it.42

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Writing to noise Philippe Sollers reads Bacon’s art practice – echoing some of the painter’s own comments – as rendering the question of whether ‘to be or not to be’ redundant, replacing it instead with the question of how ‘to be and not to be’.43 We might read Celan’s poetry as unfolding across a similar dichotomy, that of being and nothingness. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has written of the ‘dizziness’ which we ‘experience’ whilst reading Celan as ‘an experience of nothingness’.44 Nothingness is here understood in Heidegerrean terms, as that which is ever-present yet manifests itself only at particular moments, such as when the individual experiences angst. Nothingness may be present all the time but most of the time it is so only in obscurity. We live the everyday as an event which is only occasionally punctured/punctuated by what we recognize as an experience. It is in these rare moments of recognition that we encounter nothingness. If Celan’s poetry is experienced in the way Lacoue-Labarthe suggests then it is not ‘read’ in the usual sense of the word. The reader, instead, moves into a space without significance where ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not. The self disappears but not in a catastrophic way. Poetry, in this sense, is a clearing of space, a digging of a hole, an opening of a chasm. This gap leads to the experience of dizziness which is a non-experience: the ‘non-form of pure non-event’45 Lacoue-Labarthe describes poems as ‘pure wanting-to-say nothing, nothingness, that against which and through which there is presence, what is’.46 The poem can only ‘say’ if it says nothing, because saying kneads nothing, forms itself by way of its facilitating absence. Nothing, the before of self, is the noise that births speech. Speech shapes itself out of this noisy nothing which abjection protects us from: the anxiety-inducing dizziness, the moment when I am and am not, the experience that occurs but as a none-occurrence, the moment of ambiguity, of blurring. Kristeva in fact describes abjection as a ‘sight-clouding dizziness’, a seeing nothing.47 Abjection is the impossible instant when the subject faces the void out of which it became, the all that is the Nothing. Kristeva, as mentioned previously, describes abjection as what ‘seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’.48 When Kristeva writes that the abject is not an object (except in opposition to ‘I’) this is because the abject is not. The abject is, however, ‘not nothing, either’.49 It is ‘a something that I do not recognize as a thing’.50 Nothing here is the no thing, das Ding, the missed experience of the Real that grounds our subjectivity. Nothing is the non-memory of the mother that persists in the subject. To clarify what nothing is/is not it is useful to turn to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty writes:

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It is precisely because Being and Nothingness, the yes and the no, cannot be blended together like two ingredients that, when we see being, nothingness is immediately there, and not in the margin like the zone of non-vision around our field of vision, but over the whole expanse of what we see, as what installs it and disposes it before us as spectacle.51 The something is braided to the nothing like the symbolic is braided to the semiotic. They are exclusive and inseparable. Nothing is everything, the before-child that is plenitude (child as part of the Mother, not apart from the Mother) is this not, is not. The Mother must be rejected and a space must be created in order for the child to be. The Mother must become the nothing, must unbecome. If we try to say this unbecoming, this becoming nothing, if we word the negative, we destroy its negativity. If we speak (of ) the negative, we cannot avoid elevating it to a sort of positivity and conferring upon it a sort of being thereby depriving it of the non-quality which is nothingness. Celan, however, creates a space within his poetry through which to become proximate with this no thing. The silence Celan’s poetry shares an affinity with traumatic experience. It can be read as an attempt to write his way into catastrophe. The attempt is made in the knowledge that this writing can never reach this non-experience. Celan concluded the poem Aschenglorie with the famous line: ‘Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen,’ ‘No one bears witness for the witness’.52 This no one includes language. One of his desires is to communicate the futility of writing. In the last, most elliptical poems, language, through an excess of sense, of connotation and imagery, grows closer and closer to meaninglessness. The late works are compact, compacted. Language is put under immense pressure as it is called upon to operate across multiple registers of meaning – astrological, biological, and geological.53 The pared poetry Celan wrote towards the end is close to an unwording. The carefully chosen words, tight, precise, polysemic, produce a surfeit of sense, a too much, teetering close to nonsense. The words have no space. They are compressed. There is no room to breathe: Die Posaunstelle tief im glühenden Leertext in Fackelhöhe, im Zeitloch:

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hör dich ein mit dem Mund. The Trumpet Part deep in the glowing lacuna at lamp height in the time hole: listen your way in with your mouth.54 The verse gestures towards the void, the hole, the lacuna, emptiness.55 Levi calls Celan’s late compositions an ‘atrocious chaos without a glimmer of light’.56 This is twilight writing. These words are created as night is falling. The hole within, Celan’s abjection, is becoming the hole without. The black cracks, the lettering, fissures within the page. These letters have no meaning, they are not. They cleave the paper. The glow Celan describes is the noise that beckons from the bottom of the word-voids, the warmth of reunion with the nothingness of union, the blissful dissipation of self into plenitude. These words are not to be read, they are to be spoken. The reader must attend to the sounds of the syllables. It is these which form the word-mouth, the means of access to the semiotic underside of language, the way back to the beginning. Levi is right to see shades in Celan’s poems. He writes of ‘this darkness (which) grows from page to page until the last inarticulate babble consternates like the rattle of a dying man, and in fact that is just what it is’.57 This babble is the noise. It is the collapsing of things, of discrete signifiers, of sense, back to the no thing, to the before of becoming. This is what renders it a ‘language of the lifeless’.58 The poetry is not meant to mean but, instead, to shock. In reading the verses aloud knowledge of the potential death of self comes to reside in the tip of the tongue. Rochelle Tobias has analysed how Celan exploits the ways in which words are spoken, weaving the differing motions of the lingual and the lips into his poems until they become an aspect of its significance.59 It is these muscular exertions, rhythms, the motions of the mentalis, quadratis and orbicularis muscles, which become ascendant in the late poems. The body is brought to the fore. There is no sound in Celan, no shape, no signification. His ‘poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence’.60 This silence, this mouthing of nothing, embodies rather than figures horror.

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Celan’s voice Levi’s interpretation of Celan emphasizes the absence of light in the poetry and also its coldness, he describes the reader as gripped ‘as in an ice-cold vice’.61 His is therefore a specular and tactile reading. He has picked up on the synaesthetic qualities in Celan’s verse discussed earlier. The darkness Levi perceived had importance for Celan from the beginning. Todesfuge begins black: Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinchen sie nachts wir trinken und trinken Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink it.62 The black milk, the life-giver in mourning, the food of childhood is here made malignant. Black is, figuratively, the colour that absorbs all colours, the hole. Bruno Bettelheim reads this black milk as a poison masquerading as nourishment, as a metaphor for a mother murdering her child: ‘when one is forced to drink black milk from dawn to dusk, whether in the death camps of Nazi Germany, or while lying in a possibly luxurious crib, but there subjected to the unconscious death wishes of what overtly may be a conscientious mother – in either situation, a living soul has death for a master’.63 The black milk may also be a reference Celan had read to what was literally drunk in the camps.64 The black milk may be language. The ears drink language from dawn until dusk. It is difficult to close the ear, to cease to drink the sounds of the world.65 The composer Luciano Berio stated that ‘the ear is the organ of space and time, and it’s always listening to and locating something’.66 The ear swallows sound, digests it, thereby situating the self in the world of acoustic sense. In the camps the ear absorbs the sounds of starvation, the sounds of destruction, the mocking sound of music, the sounds of the dying, the death rattle, and the many languages, the ‘cursing in Russian, German, Polish, French’.67 These are the sounds of Auschwitz, sounds that have ceased, sounds that have been replaced, in some minds, by the violence of a forgetful silence.68 There is at least one recording of Celan reciting Todesfuge.69 Felstiner describes it as providing the listener with ‘quickenings, emphases, retards, pauses, caustic articulation, and even a phrase misspoken’.70 The recording is and is not Celan. In the process of making this recording something

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happened to the poet’s voice. A tape-recording consists of a magnetic ‘image’ of a sound stored onto a tape. The ‘image’ is made up of magnetized iron oxide or chromium dioxide granules in a magnetic emulsion. Given the date of the recording, Celan’s voice’s ‘image’ would be made up of iron (otherwise known as ferrous) oxide. His voice would have been given form, transformed, through the act of recording. As the tape played it would have been subjected to a biasing signal accompanying the signal of Celan’s voice. The biasing signal ‘stirs’ the magnetization of the tape to make sure each part of the signal (the voice) has the same magnetic starting conditions for recording. We might compare it to the way we stir paint to make sure it has the same consistency before we apply it. The handling of the paint is like the fixing of the aural image against the tape. When we listen to the recording, we do not hear Celan’s voice but a representation of it. The voice vanishes through the act that seeks to preserve it. We hear an electronic image of that voice, a simulation generated by the reading of the magnetic image. The technology of preservation protects through destruction. We do, however, hear something, something we would like to think of as the echo of Celan’s voice. The intercession of technology cannot separate us entirely from it. It is a voice without obvious origin. We see the tape-recorder and hear a voice without a body, an acousmatic voice. Michel Chion describes the acousmatic as being those sounds which are heard but whose cause or source cannot be seen.71 He goes on to state: … this voice without a place that belongs to the acousmêtre takes us back to an archaic, original stage: of the first months of life or even of before birth, during which the voice was everything and it was everywhere (but bear in mind that this “everywhere” quality is nameable only retrospectively, the concept can arise for the subject who no longer occupies the undifferentiated everywhere.72 Celan’s exilic voice, a voice without a place, carries the listener back to a time before listening. The words have shape but the voice in the recording has no immediately recognizable origin. It is not from anywhere, anybody. This voice is what holds the poetry together. To read Celan is a different experience from listening to a reading of his work. The mute words on the page are, as Levi suggests, noise. The words mouthed, sounded, are however, something else. In the case of the recordings by Celan of his poems what the listener hears is a relatively high-pitched voice with a seemingly Saxon accent. This means that, to a German audience, there is not the standard pronunciation of ‘Hochdeutsch’. This is not received German. There

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is, perhaps, an intentional vocal regional straying. Celan’s accent, whilst noteworthy, is, however, of less interest than the lack of dynamism in his voice. There is hardly any modulation in his speech. The pronunciation of each word is sharp, precise but there is little variation in intonation. This creates a sense of detachment for the listener and also, at times, a feeling of monotony. In some poems, such as Todesfuge, there are marked variations in pace but there is still a flatness in the delivery. The lack of modulation means Celan’s voice is pared of drive-investment. The semiotic content of his speech is minimal. Celan’s recitals of his poetry, in the way they suppress the semiotic excesses that are so evident when reading his verses on the printed page, take on the character of the prose of Charlotte Delbo that will be discussed later. Through reducing the semiotic in his speech, Celan recuperates his poems from the background noise which Levi feels overwhelms them. By way of his mode of delivery the poet pulls himself back from the realm of abjection. Celan’s voice here takes on the quality of a container, in Wilfred Ruprecht Bion’s sense of the term, making sense of the horror within the poems. The container/contained relationship identified by Bion is formed in early infancy. In Bion’s account, the young child is initially overwhelmed with raw sense data, beta-elements, which it does not possess the psychic capacity to process. It therefore feels compelled to expel this data. This expulsion is accomplished by projecting these ‘unorganised, inchoate elements of experience into the maternal breast, where they undergo a transformation into alpha-elements’.73 The mother’s role in this interaction is to provide a word or phrase which will fasten to this experience. Through expressing the meaning of this data, enclosing it in an appropriate word, the mother ‘provides a container for it’.74 Alpha-elements give form to raw experience. They return the experience to the child in a way that is bearable, containable. In Celan’s recitation of his poetry the noise of his work is similarly transformed into something tolerable. The semiotic excess of the verse is counteracted, contained by a highly calculated manner of speaking which privileges the symbolic. The abject material of the poems is not expelled when Celan reads them out loud but it is placed in abeyance. The semiotic is bound to the symbolic again. The spoken poems, at least in Celan’s delivery of them, therefore differ markedly from the written ones.

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Words for things Writing, like recordings of the human voice, always forms a leaving behind. It constitutes a process of separation, despite also comprising a technology of preservation. Feeling falls away in the act of writing it. The writer tries to catch up with an experience that they have already passed by, that is past. The translation of an experience or a non-experience into verse is therefore a kind of destruction. To call something into words is not to make it available for recall but also to efface it. Something is ‘not’ when it is called ‘something’, it becomes something else – letters, ink, typeface. It changes shape. A remark by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe encapsulates the problem posed by this shapeshifting. In his Theory of Colours, Goethe observed ‘how difficult it is to avoid substituting the sign for the thing; how difficult to keep the essential quality still living before us, and not to kill it with the word’.75 Language is not a prison-house but a charnel-house. The inscription of the word, inscription in any form or thought, is an epitaph. Writing is erasure. It kills the thing. It is for this reason that Celan did not write poetry. It is only once we have this in mind that we should read Todesfuge, the poem that, as mentioned earlier, was rumoured to have prompted Adorno to state that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Todesfuge, written in German but first published in Romanian as Tangoul Mortii or ‘Tango of Death’, is a poem about writing. To write in German was a problem, the language was implicated in the horrors it was seeking to describe.76 Celan is writing in German to Germany. The mann, the man, in the house in Todesfuge also writes in German to Germany, ‘der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland’, ‘he writes when dusk falls to Germany’.77 Celan and the Nazi both share a language. The serpents that the man plays with are words, the same curls and coils that Celan now describes him with. The language has a history. Celan takes language out of time to escape the contagion of etymology. He makes ‘the German language take flight on a line of escape’.78 What Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say of Kafka’s use of the German language can, at times, equally be said of Celan: He will push it toward a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or by myth, that will be an absolute deterritorialization, even if it is slow, sticky, coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.79 In their book Towards a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari compare Kafka to Céline in that the two write ‘with a kind of minor music’.80 This music is the music discussed earlier in relation Céline’s prose, the music that

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opens writing to the semiotic and frees the drives. Celan does not write into this music but from within it. He writes noise from within noise. His writing is an aftereffect of the impulses which Céline discharged in his writing but which the Third Reich acted out as physical violence, as suffering, as torture, as mass murder. Celan composes his verses from within the experience of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. He prevents his verses from overwriting this horror through creating conditions in which what he terms the breath-turn can emerge. The breath-turn is at the limit of meaning. Celan described it in detail during a speech he gave on receiving the Georg Büchner prize in 1960. The speech is usually referred to as The Meridien. It was about how not to write: ‘I am talking about a poem that does not exist!’81 In The Meridien, Celan argues that ‘Art makes for a certain distance from the I. Art requires that we travel a certain space in a certain direction, on a certain road’.82 He believes that art as a concept constrains and restricts. Poetry, for him, only exists in moments where the tendentious aspect of ‘art’ is resisted. It exists in the invitation to turn against art’s impositions: to take a path less travelled. Poetry comes into being only when the poem initiates a pause, an Atemwende, ‘a turning of our breath’.83 The poetic is a point of suspension of unknown duration: ‘Nobody can tell how long the pause for breath – hope and thought – will last. “Speed”, which has always been “outside”, has gained yet more speed.’84 The breath-turn, the moment that is not inhalation or exhalation, the poetic, is not bounded by oppositions. The breath-turn, as neither/nor, is silence, noise. The breath-turn is perhaps the aleph, which in Hebrew ‘represents nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word begins with a vowel’.85 It is the moment in which a shape is chosen. The aleph can also ‘be said to denote the source of all articulate sound, and indeed the Kabbalists always regarded it as the spiritual root of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet’. 86 It is that out of which voice (shaped sound) originates. ‘To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing; it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate specific meaning.’87 Kristeva suggests that the only way to communicate the aleph would be through a language ‘of rampancy, boundlessness, the unthinkable, the untenable, the unsymbolizable’.88 The breath-turn describes a literary voice giving up its identity. It forms the ‘farthest limit of the I-voice’, it doesn’t even involve a voice, it is ‘a pre-vocal expression, even before the air in the airway rattles the larynx’.89 It is, perhaps, further than this limit, the I-voice fallen silent: the end of I that is the breakdown of self. The breath-turn is not a pause whilst speaking, or a space between words on a page. The breath-turn is the space between the words on the page

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and the page. It is the pause between the pause and speech. It is not spoken. It cannot be written. It cannot be thought. It is ‘not’. Celan explains that the ‘poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an “already-no-more” into a “still-here”’.90 The breath-turn is the ‘already-no-more’, the little death between breaths. It is the abject, ‘edged with the sublime’.91 It is the painful joy of plenitude regained. The poem Wirk Nicht Voraus from Lichtzwang (1970) illustrates this: Wirk nicht voraus, sende nicht aus, steh herein: durchgründet vom Nichts, ledig allen gebets, feinfügig, nach der Vor-Schrift, unüberholbar, nehm ich dich auf, statt aller Ruhe. Do not work ahead, do not send forth, stand into it, enter: transfounded by nothingness, unburdened of all prayer, microstructured in heeding the pre-script unovertakable, I make you at home, instead of all rest.92

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Celan wants ‘a terrifying silence’.93 For this, he requires quiescence, the end of motion and the silence which that brings: the noise. The ‘Vor-Schrift’ of ‘Wirk Nicht Voraus’, the pre-script, is the nothing out of which writing emerges. It is the noise before the sound. The pre-script is that which is always already overwritten. It is what Celan strives to write towards. He wants to give the reader the underneath of writing. Poetry is when it is not, when it is able to provide a glimpse of the underside of language, what Levi called the ‘background noise’. This ‘background noise … is the ground of the world, the backdrop of the universe, the background of being, maybe’.94 It is a horrible noise. The camps were the epicentre of this horror: ‘under the word and language, this wave, and beneath the wave, the black noise’.95 Celan writes in this horror, not of it. His poetry surfaces from out of the after-effects of fascism. William Haver has described the hibakusha (the survivors of atomic bombing) as being in a disjunct simultaneity, ‘in an essential abjection … neither alive nor dead, neither present nor absent, neither inside nor outside the human, but the surplus of every binary’.96 The survivors of the Holocaust form a similar surplus, an outside to the binary-relation. They have known the edge of noise, have glimpsed nothingness. Celan is able to arrest the reader, draw their attention to this state of abjection, by way of the breath-turn.

4 AMIDST THE NIGHTMARE

The Grey Zone The historian and translator Ber Mark first gave the name the Scrolls of Auschwitz to a set of manuscripts which were buried in separate caches by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, at Birkenau to record the atrocities they were forced to bear witness to. The documents were concealed in the grounds of crematoria II and III. In The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Mark discusses six such manuscripts by three authors, although eight caches of documents have actually been found.1 The first discovery was a letter written in French by Chaim Herman, which was found sometime in February 1945 in a heap of ashes behind the crematoria. This letter has now been lost and it is known only in transcript. On 5 March 1945, a notebook and a letter written in Yiddish by Zalmen Gradowski were unearthed near crematorium II. These now form part of the archive at the Medical Military Museum in St. Petersburg. Another manuscript found in early 1945 also appears to have been written by Zalmen Gradowski.2 A transcript of this work is held at Yad Vashem but the original has disappeared. In April 1945 a ledger containing an account in Yiddish written by Leyb Langfus entitled Der Geyresh was disinterred in the vicinity of crematoria II and III. This is now held at the State Museum Archive in Auschwitz. In the summer of 1952, in the grounds of crematorium III, an exercise book containing 21 pages inscribed in Yiddish which has also been attributed to Leyb Langfus was recovered. The last-known location for this manuscript was the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw but it appears to have been mislaid. On 28 July 1961 two manuscripts which had been buried together were retrieved from the grounds of crematorium III. The shorter text is by Zalman Lewental. The author of the longer text, which was probably written in the

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Lodz ghetto, is unknown. The originals of these two texts are in the archive at Auschwitz where they are currently in conservation. On 17 October 1962 an exercise book and some loose sheets of paper written in Yiddish and a list written in Polish were discovered. These are all attributed to Zalman Lewental by the archive at Auschwitz were they are held. On 24 October 1980 a final manuscript was uncovered, it was a letter written in Greek by Marcel Nadjar. The letter is preserved in the archive at Auschwitz. Mark analyses only the texts by Gradowski found on 5 March 1945; the text by Langfus found in 1952; and the texts by, or attributed to, Lewental found in 1952, 1961 and 1962. He could not have known of the other Gradowski text found in 1945, the work by Langfus also found that year, or the letter by Nadjar.3 Mark was, however, probably aware of Chaim Herman’s letter, although he does not reproduce it in The Scrolls of Auschwitz. He may have disregarded it because it was written in French and exhibits anxiety about how the actions of the Sonderkommando will be perceived retrospectively. Mark’s decision to overlook Herman’s account may provide an example of what Zoë Waxman refers to in Writing the Holocaust as the discriminatory ways in which archival materials are employed to reinforce pre-existing ideals.4 Mark frames the Yiddish writings as heroic suggesting that they ‘paint the moral portrait of the author-fighters, the spirit of the Sonderkommandos’.5 Herman’s missive, however, begs his wife not to have a bad opinion of him despite what she may subsequently read about the actions of the Special Squad.6 There was, therefore, concern amongst some members of the squad that many of their deeds would later be viewed as far from valiant. These deeds took place in close proximity to and, sometimes, within the gas chambers. The Sonderkommando were ‘entrusted with the running of the crematoria’.7 This required them ‘to maintain order among the new arrivals (often completely unaware of the destiny awaiting them) who must be sent into the gas chambers; to extract the corpses from the chambers, pull gold teeth from jaws, cut the women’s hair, sort and classify clothes, shoes, and the contents of luggage; transport the bodies to the crematoria and oversee the operation of the ovens; extract and eliminate the ashes’.8 Members of the Sonderkommando also had to clean the gas chambers after each use. As Josef Sackar, who survived Auschwitz, explains, ‘after every killing we washed everything and sprayed it with a substance so that the odour of the gas would not remain’.9 The Special Squad knew the practicalities of mass murder intimately. The reality of genocide impressed itself upon them. It registered through all their senses, including those that are proximate, smell, taste and touch, as is evinced frequently in the testimony of survivors from the squads. Shlomo Dragon, for example, describes how the ‘sweetish taste

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of the gas’ could be perceived when the doors of the chambers were opened after a gassing.10 It was, however, possible to become habituated to the sensory experiences that accompanied working in the crematoria. Shlomo Venezia writes for example, that he eventually got used to the sickening smell of the place.11 In his essay ‘The Grey Zone’, Levi suggests that ‘conceiving and organizing the squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime’.12 This is because the Nazis endeavoured to make Jewish people complicit in the destruction of their fellows. The creation of the Sonderkommando ‘represented an attempt to shift on to others, specifically the victims, the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence’13 Members of the squads were made to contribute to the smooth-running of mass murder. They were, in effect, participating in the perpetration of genocide. Levi describes their actions as forming ‘an extreme case of collaboration’.14 This was not, however, collaboration of the kind discussed in relation to Céline. The Sonderkommando was not composed of individuals drawn from the margins of society but from its centre. There are no shared characteristics unifying all the members of the squads. They are from different geographical locations, classes and professions, and have varied personalities. Their only collective trait is the desire to survive. Nevertheless, some members did perceive themselves as collaborators of a kind. The issue of cooperation with the Nazis weighs on Venezia, who writes: ‘I don’t know whether we can call it “collaboration” when we were trying to reduce, to however small a degree, the suffering of people who were about to die’.15 He adds later, ‘we were forced, whereas collaborators, in general, are volunteers’.16 The alternative to working in one of the squads was death, as demonstrated by a group of 400 Jews from Corfu who were selected in July 1944 to join the Sonderkommando. Levi explains that the men ‘refused without exception to do the work and [were therefore] immediately killed by gas’.17 It might be thought that by including this information in his account of the squads, he is inviting the reader to condemn those who did not choose death. Levi, however, explicitly states that no one is authorized to judge them.18 There is, as Gideon Greif has recognized, a tension in his stance, an ‘unresolved ambiguity’.19 Greif believes that through using the term ‘collaboration’ in reference to the Sonderkommando, Levi ‘implies at least a subliminal judgmental attitude’.20 It is, however, this ambiguity which is the key to Levi’s reconstruction of the grey zone, a place in which uncertainty reigned supreme ‘with illdefined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants’.21 Inmates in the camp did commit acts which were detrimental

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or even fatal to other prisoners. Levi cautions against judging such inmates, arguing that the greatest responsibility lies with the system that created the conditions, the ‘state of coercion,’ in which they made their choices.22 This reality of their actions does, however, have to be accepted, confronted. Levi writes of the Sonderkommando, that ‘one is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist’.23 The wish to turn away is born of feelings of abjection, revulsion caused by the nature of the work undertaken by the squads and the moral quandaries it raises. One element of Kristeva’s conception which is frequently overlooked is its moral aspect. Abjection is described as ‘immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you …’.24 The Sonderkommando do not manifest the knowing dissimulation, the betrayal of appearances that characterizes many of Kristeva’s examples. Sometimes in their own perception and in those of others, however, there was something traitorous about the activities of the squads. The relative lack of interest, until recently, in the testimonies of members who survived may, in part, be explained by the apparent ambiguity of their status in relation to the Nazi oppressors for whom they laboured. The seeming ambivalence of scholars towards the Scrolls of Auschwitz may be for the same reason. The manuscripts buried at Birkenau do not form part of the literary canon of Holocaust testimony, despite the fact that the accounts of both Gradowski and Langfus comprise of carefully composed prose. These writings from within the event promote great unease. Their authors are, perhaps, too implicated in the horrors they describe. The matter of testimony There may, however, be a second reason why the documents buried in the grounds of the crematoria are largely ignored. Georges Didi-Huberman, whose work Images malgré tout will be discussed in more detail in the final chapter, caused great controversy when he argued passionately for the testimonial importance of four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando, now known only as Alex, in and around crematorium V in August 1944. The controversy derives from the fact that the photographs, in their stubborn materiality, are difficult to reconcile with claims that the Holocaust is beyond representation. The most famous proponent of such a view is Claude Lanzmann whose position is that there are no images of the Shoah.25 Lanzmann accepts that archival images from the camps and elsewhere exist but he contends that they do not possess the power of evocation

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that the speech of a witness provides and which is necessary in order to attest to the Holocaust. He has in mind the suggestive power of the interviews of survivors and perpetrators included in the film Shoah (Dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985). Photographs and other imagery do not ‘show’ the event. They are opaque and do not encourage the imaginative engagement that a listener performs whilst attending to a survivor’s account. For Lanzmann, the event can only be shown by way of the testimonies of individuals who, through reliving what happened to them in their verbal accounts, incarnate the truth of the experience.26 Veracity is acquired only in instances which form a kind of re-inhabiting of the past in the present, one which prompts the listener to picture that past. This viewpoint has led Dominick LaCapra to suggest that in Shoah Lanzmann is fixated upon engineering situations in which survivors act out rather than work through their trauma.27 Didi-Huberman responds to Lanzmann’s dismissal of the archival image by arguing that the film-maker has failed to grasp ‘what constitutes an archive, a testimony, or an act of imagination’.28 Lanzmann reduces the archive to mere evidence: to turn to the archive thus becomes proof of doubt about the Holocaust. In such a conception, the idea that images such as the four photographs might operate to further understanding or to signal the presence of acts of resistance amongst the victims is untenable. Lanzmann also perceives the contents of the visual archive to possess solely informational value.29 To him it does not have the emotional power of survivor testimony. Didi-Huberman, however, sees the four photographs taken by Alex as invitations to imagine. They have the capacity to vehicle the feel of events. Far from being merely informational, the images are ‘permeated by the deficiency of information’.30 This paucity of information is the product of a lack of clarity and detail. One photograph, for example, depicts only trees and sky. It is not a source a historian would turn to for ‘proof ’ of the Holocaust. This picture, however, along with the others, has immense value if it is regarded not as evidence but as an invitation to imagine: ‘when facing this we are facing the overwhelming necessity of an empathetic gesture’.31 What DidiHuberman is describing here is imaginative projection. He believes the four pictures call upon the viewer to actively envisage how they were produced. The phenomenological import of the photographs is what a conception of the archive such as Lanzmann’s irresponsibly negates. The final photograph taken by Alex, discussed in greater depth later, well illustrates this sensory significance. The picture, of a series of jagged forms that must be tree branches, is seldom reproduced or examined as it is almost exclusively event rather than information. Through its minimal content that appears almost abstract, it reveals how hazardous it was to take pictures. It is our responsibility to

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imagine the risks Alex ran to bring us this image from out of the black hole of Auschwitz. Didi-Huberman’s arguments emerge from out of a close visual analysis of the composition of each picture – if composition is the right word given the contingencies – and it is for this reason that part of Images malgré tout is formed of a passionate condemnation of those who have previously manipulated the photographs in order to make their content clearer. The implications of these kinds of actions are considerable as can be grasped by turning to the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Nadjar’s letter, the last document to be discovered, has so far received relatively little attention in comparison with the other manuscripts. There are probably two clearly identifiable reasons for this oversight. The text is in poor condition with large parts of it illegible. This deficiency of information renders it similar to the photographs discussed by Didi-Huberman. The writing that is clear is also not of significant literary interest. Despite Nadjar’s lack of erudition in comparison with some of the other writers, and the lack of readable writing remaining in the letter, the archive at Auschwitz clearly feels that the important aspect of the document is the words upon its pages. The ink is what is of import or, more specifically, the characters it has both brought into being and sustains. The paper is simply a necessary support, nothing more. The evidentiary value of Nadjar’s letter resides in what he has written. This is made obvious by the way the letter appears now. It has been conserved or, perhaps, restored since its discovery. Restoration, with its connotations of alteration and repair, is a better term for what has taken place here. The letter has changed markedly in appearance. The damaged pages of the letter, which were clearly visible when it was first found, have as far as possible been mended. The discoloration of the paper, its dirtiness, has also been reversed. The visible effects of the time this manuscript spent buried beneath the earth concealed in a thermos flask stashed in a leather briefcase are no longer obvious. The only record of its prior state is now a series of black and white photographs of the individual pages. In these images a historical record of the colour of the pages when they were first discovered has been sacrificed for the greater detail available in monochrome. What the conservation work reveals is that the physical evidence of the document’s history was regarded as less important than the written record of the horrors the Sonderkommando saw taking place around them, and participated in, that is impressed upon it. The writing is, of course, vital here but the surfaces these writings were originally inscribed upon, the substances they are composed of, also constitute a vital kind of testimony. The stubborn material, the residue of actions and decisions, is significant, not easily separated from the words it supports: that rely upon it.

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The evident embrittlement of Nadjar’s letter in its original state was partly the product of the built-in acidity of the paper caused by the alumrosin sizing added to the wood pulp before it was dried.32 The size, whilst it impacts upon the long-term lifespan of the paper, is necessary as it makes the paper hydrophobic, resistant to penetration by aqueous fluids such as ink and thereby suitable for writing upon.33 The inherent propensity of the alum-sized paper to degrade because of its acidity has, however, undoubtedly been exacerbated by the fact these pages were buried under the ground for 35 years. The damage the letter has incurred since its composition bears witness to its being hidden, to this need to bury it. The suppression of the letter’s decomposition that has accompanied its restoration acts to conceal the evidence that it was previously concealed. The decay of the pages upon which Nadjar wrote his letter, or of the ledger in which Langfus wrote his account of the journey of a transport to Auschwitz – which is also held in the archive at Auschwitz and has not, so far, been restored – is, of course, not an indication of the pressures under which the manuscripts were made although, as will be discussed later, there is substantial physical evidence in Langfus’s text of the trying conditions under which it was produced. The stains and tears, however, form tangible reminders of where these works were deposited, at least for a time. The detritus that adheres to Langfus’s ledger forms a residue of the earth of the grounds of the crematorium in which it was buried. This is paper stained by the dead. Zalmen Gradowski makes direct reference to the fact burying documents with corpses causes them to become marked by the bodies of the dead, stating that his ‘notebook and other notes have lain in graves, getting saturated with the blood of not always entirely burnt bones and pieces of flesh’.34 The matter visible on the pages of Langfus’s ledger is not mere muck: it is not dirt. This patina, these traces of the earth, reminders of that earth, form part of what makes this manuscript such a powerful form of testimony. The words in the manuscript describe mass-death but something of those deaths is also embodied in the pages, adheres to the fibres of the paper: inhabits its very fabric. Birkenau is within this writing, underneath and alongside it, at once disrupting and reinforcing its message. The moisture of the soil surrounding the crematoria entered the glass jar the ledger was buried in. It seeped into the leaves, blurred the ink, causing it to bleed through the paper from one side to another. The surviving manuscripts are literally stained by the soil of Birkenau, flecked and specked by the place. The blue ink used by Langfus for much of his account was soluble and therefore sensitive to the effects of the humidity in the jar. Its blurring, a contingent occurrence, a side effect of concealment, has much resonance here.

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The blue bleed creates words close to collapse, to flowing outwards into a mess of coloured lines, a non-sense or noisiness. The entire manuscript is not, however, written in the same vibrant, delicate azurine. Later Langfus is forced to switch to a darker ink, now faded to grey, before briefly returning to blue again, and then writing the rest in black. This change in writing material reinforces that the Sonderkommando were writing with pens and upon whatever paper they could find from the abandoned belongings of those who had died in the gas chambers. The materials with which to write were organized in the same way that food, the sustenance that made writing possible, was also acquired. This testimony, these materials that comprise it, bear witness to the privileged position the Sonderkommando had within the camp. The writings register their physical energy and mental vigour. They also display, through their existence, the relative privacy afforded to the members of the Special Squad. The act of writing at Auschwitz was fraught with danger. Primo Levi states in Moments of Reprieve, that ‘the fact of writing alone was intrinsically suspect’ and ‘it was strictly forbidden’.35 The consequences of being caught putting pen or pencil to paper were potentially fatal. An inmate in the main camp would find it extremely difficult to acquire the necessary materials, make the time and get the opportunity to produce a letter or other form of testimony if, indeed, they had the energy and courage to do so. The materials that enabled them to be produced bear witness to their role in the camp. Langfus’s ledger, the fountain used to write in it, the inks, were all probably formerly possessions of those who were murdered. These would either have been sourced from the belongings left in the undressing room or purchased from the ‘Kanada’ Kommando members who assisted in sorting the possessions abandoned by new arrivals from the trains.36 The Scrolls of Auschwitz were written on second-hand paper. This is made clear by the calculation, the pencil sum, in the ledger which appears to be the only entry in the hand of its original owner. The script differs from that of Langfus. His possession of the financial record book is bound up with his membership of the Sonderkommando and the advantages that accompany it. It is this tension between collaboration and the capacity to resist which it makes possible, a tension powerfully evoked in the material of the Scrolls, which makes the testimony of the Special Squad so difficult to countenance, so abject. There is, however, a powerful responsibility on the part of the reader to inhabit these scripts, to perform the kind of imaginative projection Didi-Huberman encourages in relation to the four photographs taken by Alex. The Scrolls possess a similarly evocative

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potential. This potential resides not in the content of the writing but in its appearance and what that reveals. Langfus, for example, strives to maximize his use of each page that he inscribes in the ledger. The script frequently exceeds its printed lines and is brought close to the edges of the pages. It is only with the decay of the binding that unused free space towards the inner edges of the pages has been revealed. Langfus could not access this expanse of paper at the time he was writing. The way the words cover most of each page demonstrates how important making the most of the available surface was felt to be. As mentioned earlier, the means with which to write were not easy to come by with paper and ink forming scarce resources which were not to be squandered. The way lines of words are brought close to the edge of the page creates a sense of being hemmed in. The sentences run up against limits, are confined by the borders of the paper. The look of the writing creates a feeling of claustrophobia, of enclosure, entrapment. The words cannot escape the page. The text, however, whilst crammed is not so close together or small as to be unreadable. Legibility is not sacrificed. A fine balance is being struck between wordage and clarity. That this was written carefully can clearly be seen. Langfus’s recognition of the need for economy, however, does not prevent his handwriting from manifesting graphic flourishes, it possesses an extravagance in the way certain characters are formed. Habit is not easy to curtail. It is in these ornaments, these inky luxuries, that the extra energy of the Sonderkommando members in contrast to other members of the camps is most visible. These graphic traits are unique to each individual. They form what differentiates writing in one hand from another. Langfus’s style of writing, here understood as the way he forms the characters that constitute the words of his text, is a form of self-expression. To follow this penmanship, these flourishes and their profligacy, is to begin to recognize that Langfus saw himself as a self. This is not the writing towards disintegration of a Guy Fawkes discussed in the second chapter, a person in pain losing their personhood. This is not evidence of a loss of self but rather of the sustaining of self in spite of all. This resilience, this graphic maintenance of a sense of identity, is disturbing as it belies the claim of Dori Laub that the Holocaust created ‘a world in which one could not bear witness to onself ’.37 This ‘loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself ’ meant that ‘one’s identity [ceased] to exist as well’.38 Finding the words The inmate’s loss of self arose, for Laub, because they were no longer ‘recognized as a subject’.39 Those imprisoned in the camps were not perceived as

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human by their captors. In the case of the Sonderkommando, however, there was sufficient interaction between the SS and squad members for the latter to preserve a sense of identity. This is evinced, famously, by Miklos Nyiszli’s account of the football match that took place between the two groups, guards and inmates, one evening before dinner.40 Levi states of this occurrence that it would have been impossible in other parts of the camp but with the members of the Sonderkommando, ‘the SS could enter the field on an equal footing, or almost’.41 Elsewhere at Auschwitz, as Nyiszli attests, prisoners lost their personalities. This was not the case in the Special Squads.42 This retention of self, acquired through being on an almost equal footing with the oppressor, risks aligning the squad members with the murderers. It is also perversely what makes their testimonies, their resistance, possible. The production of this testimony permits the Sonderkommando to exist outside of ‘the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim or of the executioner’.43 The Special Squad cannot be securely located within the binary-opposition that Laub formulates to characterize what it was like to be inside the event. The existence of the Scrolls and the brief uprising by members of the Sonderkommando, as acts of resistance, do not conform to the role of executioner. They also, however, do not constitute the actions of despairing individuals deprived of their selfhood. It is, perhaps, because of the difficulty posed to his arguments by the testimony of the Special Squad that Laub only briefly, tacitly acknowledges them, stating: … against all the odds, attempts at bearing witness did take place; chroniclers of course existed and the struggle to maintain the process of recording and of salvaging and safeguarding evidence was carried on relentlessly. Diaries were written and buried in the ground so as to be historically preserved, pictures were taken in secret, messengers and escapees tried to inform and to warn the world of what was taking place. However, these attempts to inform oneself and to inform others were doomed to fail. The historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence.44 There is no engagement by Laub with the texts that comprise the Scrolls of Auschwitz in order to demonstrate how they fail as efforts to attest to the occurrence. This is probably because despite Laub’s claim that the event was ‘beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine’, the Sonderkommando appeared all too aware of the magnitude of the crimes there were caught up in. They do, in fact, in a sense, echo his remarks. Lewental states, probably referring to historians,

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that ‘[they] will certainly not reach the truth that no one has the strength to imagine’.45 Laub and Lewental, the outside and the inside of the event, echo each other. Lewental’s account is created from fear that no one outside Auschwitz, in its aftermath, will be able to grasp what has taken place inside the camp. There is an admission that language cannot adequately vehicle this experience: ‘The truth as it really exists is immeasurably more tragic and terrible’.46 There is also, however, an undeniable faith in the power of writing at work here. It is not viewed as a futile endeavour. Writing is, in fact, to be persevered with at any cost. Those within the event certainly rate the value of their words. The difficult conditions under which Langfus was operating, for example, is clearly visible. Towards the end of Der Geyrish the ink appears to be running out. This does not, however, deter him from his task of bearing witness. The ink on these later pages of the ledger has become indistinct, almost colourless, perhaps because it was already of a thin consistency when pen was put to paper. The lines of the ledger are therefore able to assert themselves, the pink vertical bars have bled slightly but the blue horizontal stripes remain intact. Because the ink was exhausted yet no other supply was obviously to hand, the nib has scratched into the paper across these pages. At this point, Langfus appears to all intents and purposes to be practising engraving. The pages are cut into rather than coursed over. There are fingerprints on two of these inscribed pages. They are faded, old. The presence in the middle of the upper-half of each of these pages of a single print is noteworthy. It is counter-intuitive to grip the paper of a ledger here. Our fingers tend to drift to the outer edges of pages as we hold small books such as this one. The presence of the prints in these parts points towards an exploration of surface, a desire to press against, to feel the writing being created, to know it is there as texture even if it is invisible. The paper whilst visually uninteresting possesses a rich tactile dimension. These scratched sentences also attest to time being of the essence. Langfus is unwilling to wait for more ink. He wants to, needs to finish his task as quickly as possible. These pages carry a comparable phenomenological import to the photographs discussed by Didi-Huberman. In the ledger, the lack of time available, the feel of impending death, is palpable. The writing of this account cannot be put off, postponed. This situation is not something communicated by the words but by the pressures that form them. The ink gives out but the act of testimony goes on regardless. There is no time to spare here. The content of Hermann’s letter affirms there was a general sense amongst the members of the Sonderkommando that they were doomed. He writes to his family that ‘this is my last letter, our days are numbered’.47 Hermann also

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asks for forgiveness for his ‘chaotic text’ adding ‘if only you knew in what circumstances I am writing’.48 It is a sense of these circumstances which emerges in the appearance of the written account given by Langfus. If Hermann’s letter is ever found again it may also have this look of pressing urgency. Ultimately, however, Langfus ends up with pages to spare. He seems to finish before the end of the book, although it is possible he would have written more, exploited the paper that remained, but stopped when an opportune moment arose for burying the document or when he felt the risk of waiting any longer before consigning his account to the ground was too great. There is therefore something distinct about the original manuscripts, something in excess of the words carried within them. The physical condition of the surviving writings forms an important kind of evidence in its own right. There is something markedly different about the experience of reading the words of Langfus or Lewenthal or Nadjar in print, divorced from the pages upon which they were originally inscribed, rendered uniform and pristine. There is something of evidential value that is lost in transcription. These works were written from within the event, geographically and temporally. This renders them physically distinct from testimony produced retrospectively. These are not pages composed, for example, at a typewriter. They are, however the product of careful consideration. Inside the ledger that contains Der Geyrish, the leaf from an address book, the page for the letter G, was found. On it is written what appears to be a draft for the final paragraphs of the main text. The crossings out on this scrap of paper show that the writing it holds is not a stream of consciousness but a thoughtful endeavour, a composition. Langfus is striving to find the right words to fit the events that are unfolding around him, enfolding him. He is responsible for choosing words to fit, to contain, what surrounds him. As mentioned before, the Holocaust is sometimes referred to as beyond representation, as unimaginable. Here, however, writing can be seen which is being produced from one of the centres of mass murder. The words are being judiciously chosen by Langfus to stand for what is happening: this is not the right word, this is. He inhabits his future reader, seeking to work out which words will create the most appropriate responses from his reader, which come closest to capturing the horrors that envelop him. The passages on the scrap of address book describe what happened to the bodies of people from the ghetto of Maków Mazowiecki after they were gassed. There is an irony that paper usually used to record places of residence now details the fate of the displaced. Langfus writes: ‘The frying and burning of people made the air in the entire area greasy, so that as soon as people got out of the cars, they already smelt people burning’. The olfactory and tactile

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elements of the description remind us of the proximity of death. The oiliness being referred to in the passage literally adheres to those tasked with burning the dead, the smell suffuses their clothes. Langfus searches in ink for the best way to communicate this atmosphere, the conditions in which he writes, to a future reader. The decisions that can be seen being made on the scrap paper in terms of vocabulary, the finding of appropriate forms, the settling upon certain words over others, the crossings out and replacements, suggests Langfus felt precision was possible. Within the horror Laub’s argument that the Holocaust was an event without a witness is challenged by a work such as this. It provides evidence that members of the Sonderkommando did believe that language could stand for the horrors that enveloped them, for the crimes that had become their daily reality. They may not have possessed an overview of the event but their local knowledge was sufficient to grasp the enormity of the Nazis crimes. These men felt the weight of murder in their limbs. It permeated their clothes, stuck to their skin, was close, dense. The magnitude of what was happening pressed upon them. It is, in fact, what prompted them to write and bury the Scrolls. The words that are settled upon in the pages of the Scrolls in place of other possibilities form the product of decisions about how language can come as close as is possible to communicating the horror: the crossings out become as important as the words that are settled upon. They hold a message about a belief in what writing can do. They signal a search for, and finding of, what is taken to be appropriate form. This involves the authors of the Scrolls imagining their readership. It requires their thinking how others will respond to their compositions, what images their words will conjure. In this sense, the writings, like the photographs, are invitations, implorations, to imagine. This entreaty is carried out not only through the words but by way of the physical appearance of the Scrolls. The writings found in 1962, which are all attributed to Lewenthal by the archive at Auschwitz, bring to mind the abject conditions of the crematoria. The individual sheets, which were sealed in a kind of plastic sheath shortly after they were discovered, are crumpled and scuffed. Many of the pages, now separated, obviously originally formed a plain notebook. The staples that held it together must have rusted and decayed whilst it was buried. The corroding metal ate away at the centre of each sheet and there are therefore holes, chunks of paper missing from there. Brown stains have spread outwards from these gaps in each page. The effects of damp and decay have rendered much

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of the writing illegible. This interference means the documents are more visible than readable. The begrimed paper, which looks as if it possesses a rough, grainy texture, is faecal in colouring. The visual field, through the contingent effects of corrosion, echoes the abject subject matter of the writings. Most of the Scrolls now include gaps because their conditions of concealment prior to discovery have destroyed sections of script. In his Hebrew translation of some of the accounts, Mark denotes these gaps through the use of underscores and then indicates with brackets those instances where he has felt able to textually reconstruct what was present in the original, as this extract from an addendum by Lewental demonstrates: And to find a parcel of written material I find [it] my duty to conceal - - - - - so that his work will not be lost and [so] that the world - - - futu[re]49 These were pieces of writing which were secreted in the earth and recovered months and, sometimes, years later. They were produced by people who inhabited the death-world of the camps. The language of this testimony is therefore also vital if any understanding of its significance is to be reached. Lewental’s language does not involve poetic play. The account is written from within the abject. It might be thought that it is for this reason that it fails to privilege the semiotic. Lewental consciously adopts a ‘style’ which is minimal in its stylistics. This is, for instance, the case with the work of Charlotte Delbo which will be discussed in the next chapter. In fact, however, the absence of drive elements in Lewental’s writing is not shared by all the authors of the Scrolls. Although they are writing from within a universe of symbolic collapse their language, unlike that of Celan discussed in the previous chapter, does not always reflect this. The writings of Gradowski in particular, are powerfully stylistic.50 This reinforces the fact that the Sonderkommando were not like other prisoners at Auschwitz. They had maintained a sense of self, as is reflected in their accounts, rather than becoming abject. The cost of keeping their identity was to become unwilling accomplices in the perpetration of mass-murder. It is this status, their central position in the Grey Zone, rather than a loss of self that renders them abject. It is this status which also discourages many from engaging meaningfully with their accounts. The future has not, as Gradowski envisaged, judged the Sonderkommando on the basis of their writings.51 It has judged them on their other actions. There has been

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an unwillingness to heed Levi’s injunction to resist the temptation to turn away from, to abject, the Special Squads. The testimonies, however, through their content and their physical appearance do, as Gradowski imagined they would, provide invaluable insights into the horror of Auschwitz.52

5 under the skin

At the first blow … this trust in the world breaks down. The other person, ‘opposite’ whom I exist physically in the world and with whom I can exist only as long as he does not touch my skin surface as border, forces his own corporeality on me with the first blow. He is on me and thereby destroys me. It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners. Jean Améry1

31661 31661 … a sequence of figures … five numbers … a single number … a place assigned in a series … 31658, 31659, 31660, 31661, 31662, 31663 … a position in time … 31661. 31661 is an indelible number. It is a tattoo. A tattoo is a design upon the skin. In tattooing the cuticle is punctured with a needle and then impregnated with pigment, marked with figures. It is a kind of writing that introduces an unfamiliar intimacy within the body. The tattoo breaks the border between inside and outside: beneath the skin yet upon the skin, ambiguous, in-between, a part of one yet apart from one. 31661 constituted a violent inking, a rendering nameless and a naming. ‘You no longer have a name; this is your new name’.2 ‘I was now a number, nothing more.’3 The number, as postmark, pinpoints a moment of arrival and indicates a period of survival. Those who were sent straight to the gas chambers were unmarked. The number is political. In his book on skin, Steven Conner writes about ‘the power that accrues to the mark’ in actions like penal branding.4 Here the tattoo, the crude hypostatization of a bureaucratic process, is power. The number is a sign of surety for National Socialism’s authority. It is

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a number that we see and which someone felt, 31661, probably not the first blow but perhaps the most enduring. The blow as a form of physical contact manifestly differs from the touch. We are always already touched. Our body bears the imprint of others from the beginning. It is the pressure of another founds the self.5 We are shaped before we become. The mother, as fact or figure, creates our contours for us through such processes as feeding, cleaning and cradling. She draws us out, acts as our cartographer. The I originates in her compass, touched to become. Kristeva describes this process of primal mapping in Powers: Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted.6 The mother gifts us our borders through her allowances and interdictions. Yet we are also delineated in another way prior to this contouring or in conjunction with it. Our path is prepared before us. In advance of the body that becomes me there is signification. ‘This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action.’7 The body is an effect of signification rather than effecting signification. This means that language is productive rather than mimetic. As Judith Butler writes, it is also, by extension, ‘performative, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all significations’.8 Kristeva’s understanding of signification differs considerably from Butler’s in that for her language is always composed of both a semiotic and a symbolic aspect. Butler is indeed critical of Kristeva’s semiotic, identifying it as a ‘prediscursive libidinal economy which occasionally makes itself known in language, but which maintains an ontological status prior to language itself’.9 This interpretation, however, would seem to contradict Kristeva’s own understanding of the semiotic chora. The chora is articulated by the drives as they are arranged by the various constraints imposed upon the body. The theory of language Kristeva advances in Revolution is more nuanced than Butler’s reading implies. This has been recognized by Drucilla Cornell, who writes that‘it would be incorrect to argue that Kristeva’s account of the maternal is either simplistically naturalistic or ontological, because the signifiance of the maternal is given within the gender structures of the Lacanian framework, and not by the very “being” of woman’.10 Psychic structures should not be conflated with physical bodies.11

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Kristeva also makes the cultural nature of the semiotic explicit in Revolution stating that the semiotic is ‘put in place by a biological set up and is always already social and therefore historical’.12 Through the guidance of the mother the drives come together, become discursive, socially conditioned. The drive is usually conceived of as hereditary. It consists of inherited pressures within the body that require satisfaction. The baby begins wholly impulsive. Yet this beginning is always within culture. The womb is not acultural. The pulse of the mother, for example, is culturally contingent. The stresses of everyday life are measured and reflected by the mother’s body by way of the changing cadences of its heartbeat, the different soundings of its breathing. The sociocultural therefore lives through the unborn child. The matter of the child, the bones, the flesh and blood, the excitations and energies, the substances and surfaces, are arranged by the world outside as it composes the baby. The heart beats the rhythm of its age, an age that does not make the heart beat but borrows it rhythms. This matter of the child is kneaded for the world outside to become inside. It is this pliable, yet essential, matter that Kristeva refers to as the biological. In this sense, Kristeva’s understanding of language shares greater similarity with Butler’s than is immediately apparent. Butler concedes in Bodies that Matter that the ‘materiality of language, indeed, of the very sign that attempts to denote “materiality,” suggests that it is not the case that everything, including materiality, is always already language’.13 Language is material. The material though ‘never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified’.14 Kristeva’s conception of the semiotic might be read as a reversal of this award of custody: one in which signification never fully escapes from the matter through which it signifies. The drives are a constant reminder of the materiality of language. They provided the ink for primary inscriptions. Primary inscriptions occur before the advent of the drives. The drives, as already mentioned, are described by Kristeva as ‘energy charges as well as psychical marks’.15 A mark must be made before it can come to articulate. Energy has to be produced. The way the drives themselves emerge is not explained in Revolution. This process is one of primary inscription. Primary inscriptions simultaneously produce the paper and ink, the skin and drives, by way of which they are written. The inscription writes the surface upon which it will appear. The surface writes the inscription that will mark it. This invites the question as to what exists before or beneath this surface. The before is what has previously been referred to as ‘noise’. It is aimless and nameless. The drive is not until it is guided to where it is supposed to arrive. Drives become in their congregation. They are gathered and shaped by the mother as she zones the body of the child.

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The mother pressures areas of sensation into becoming and the drives then find themselves here. An area of sensation is distinguished in relation to an area without sensation. It therefore works to perform a double-naming. Sensation, the concentration of excitation, produces both itself and, through its emergence, a surrounding absence. Sensations, which are aboriginal namings, start out as temporary. The first names are presence and absence, not known as such, but felt. The first names around the orifices of the body are sensational and fleeting. These are names that are immediately forgotten, names that are not accorded the permanence of remembrance. The mother acts as a magnet attracting the drives to areas of the body through her touch, giving them a place to aim towards, somewhere to arrive and actualize themselves. As the child suckles for example, the breast focuses the drives around what will be the mouth: this orifice briefly becomes an area of sensation. When the breast is withdrawn the area of sensation evanesces into nothingness. The first thought of the child will be one of loss as the constant appearance and disappearance of sensation (and with it, its absence) enters into memory. Memory is an experience that the mind will not permit to return to the nothingness. Memory precedes thinking. The first thought is modelled on this memory, the experience of presence and absence which is any sensation. This experience is translated into loss. This translation, the first thought, is a response to the absence of touch, the absence of the breast. When the child ceases to be embosomed for instance, the thought arises that something is missing and is being missed. This thought replaces the lost touch. As Bion realized, this thought serves to keep the infant company.16 For Bion, using the infant’s expectation of a breast as a model, the term ‘thought’ is ‘the mating of a pre-conception with a frustration’.17 Thinking arises when the ‘expectation of a breast is mated with a realization of no breast available for satisfaction’.18 This mating is experienced inside as an absent breast prior to its becoming thought. Thought arises only later from out of this absence and loss. Bion goes on to explain that only if the child’s capacity for tolerating frustration is sufficient will the ‘no-breast’ inside become a thought and an apparatus for ‘thinking’ it develop.19 Words also later act to fill the emptiness that is the mouth bereft of the breast. The mother sensationalizes the child, makes the conditions for thought possible, through touch and sound. This sensory world is what Didier Anzieu terms the echotactile backcloth to communication.20 The backcloth provides the means by which communication at a distance becomes possible. Voiced sound as a source of comforting, the cooing of a mother for instance, is condensed into (and superseded by) words. The language of touch, of presence and absence, is supplemented by one of gesture. Anzieu describes this

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supersession in terms of an Aufhebung. It is a somatic dialectic within which the initial maternal caresses and murmurs are ‘at once denied, surpassed and preserved’.21 Inarticulate sounds and frequent touching appear to be transcended by talking. Speech, however, is never entirely able to suppress its intimacy with the tactile. This early voicing continues to carry. The ‘Skin Ego’ as it is elaborated by Anzieu should be understood as the resultant relief of the mother’s mapping. It is a representation of the interplay between bodies, a means of making sense of those early interactions. The mother, in caring for the child, must ultimately sacrifice proximity to the infant for an overview of it. This is necessary in order to provide for the varying needs of the infant. Different needs are satisfied at different times causing shifts in the attention given to parts of the child’s body, nourishing variations. The gestures of the mother tending to the baby, the maternal environment, form the matter out of which the fragile integument that is the Skin Ego emerges. Once the Skin Ego has been sketched out, it holds the nascent psyche together, shielding it, fulfilling a function of ‘maintaining the psyche’.22 The parchment of primal writing, it is emblazoned with ‘an original pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin’.23 This is not primary inscription, which produces only a fleeting skin. This is skin that has concretized through the repetition of such inscriptions. It is a secondary permanent skin that supersedes its transient precursor. The pre-verbal writing Anzieu writes of is therefore actually secondary inscription. The Skin Ego figures this secondary inscription. The skin has three functions which are central to Anzieu’s elaboration of the Skin Ego: The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out; it is the barrier which protects against penetration by the aggression and greed emanating from others, whether people or objects. Finally, the third function – which the skin shares with the mouth and which it performs at least as often – is as a site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by those others.24 It is a container, it keeps things in. It is a border, it separates inside/outside. It is a surface of inscription, a kind of cutaneous paper. These three functions are all interrelated. The container is also a border, as is paper. The container contains something and prevents it from escaping to an elsewhere, an outside.

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Paper that is written upon carries the memory of the moment when it was a border between two pressures: the pen and what the paper rested upon to bear the ink. A paper without support could not be written upon.25 It would move with the pen rather than meeting it. The skin as an inscribing surface must have an inside (the flesh) to support it as well as an outside. Skin, however, is punctured by orifices that undo any simple notion of an inside and an outside. These are loci of undecidability. The skin folds beneath itself, beneath the outside of the body that it is supposed to be: the anus, the ears, the lips, the nostrils, neither inside nor outside, thresholds that unsettle the image of the skin as border. In places the skin trespasses the border that it is meant to be. Whilst acknowledging that skin is paradoxical, Anzieu does not explain how the presence of uncertain holes, such as the mouth and the anus, (with)in the skin fail to trouble the Skin Ego.26 He details how knowledge of the imperfect formation of the Skin Ego can have implications for the study and treatment of masochism and narcissism, but does not explain how the Skin Ego is ever formed in such a way that it appears whole. If the undecidable areas of the skin that form part of the template upon which The Skin Ego rests are taken into account then it must always be holed. There is constant danger of psychic seepage. The Skin Ego which has partially failed in its containing function, which exhibits such a leakage, is described by Anzieu as a colander. Such an Ego, with its continuity ‘broken into by holes’, is one in which ‘thoughts, and memories are only with difficulty retained, they leak away’.27 For Anzieu however, this comprises an abnormal Skin Ego. It could be asked, given the presence of holes within the skin out of which the Skin Ego arises, why every Skin Ego is not a colander. The psychic process of abjection provides a possible answer to this question. The abject, as Kristeva explains in a frequently quoted passage from Powers, is that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’.28 The skin, as a border which disrespects itself, would seem to have an abject aspect. The skin on the surface of milk is cited by Kristeva as an example of food loathing. When ‘the eyes see or the lips touch’ this skin, a ‘gagging sensation’ is experienced.29 Is this nausea solely because of the skin of the milk, or is it also because that skin reminds the I that the rims and lids of the eyes, and the lips, as skin are liminal (inbetween outside and inside)? Waste and dung, mucus, piss, shit, spit, are also abject and function as metonyms for orifices that hole the skin. The corpse, the ‘utmost of abjection’, shows death as a ‘wound with blood and pus, or the sickly acrid smell of sweat, of decay’.30 The dead body as it is described here is a skin losing its integrity. The body is seeping out through the skin as sweat or viscid matter. Abjection as the throwing up and out of filth and refuse is

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therefore, at least partially, the expulsion of things connected to the skin’s holes. The bodily functions that expel (shitting and vomiting, for example) provide the model for the psychic process which finds these same processes repugnant. At the same time that the Skin Ego surrounds the psyche, abjection as a psychic process also emerges to support that which contains it. An imperfect Skin Ego might therefore be partly attributable to a breakdown in the process of abjection. The tattooing of 31661 was an abject act for many reasons. One is that the tattoo crosses (out) borders. The tattooist’s needle breaks into the skin, suffusing the integument with pigment. This needle prick, like a cut or a blow, can act to reassert the self. In the same way that being hit provides an unwelcome and painful, but tangible, reassertion of self, the feel of the needle suggests an act of recognition: ‘you’ are here being tattooed. Unlike a bruise or a graze, however, the tattoo does not physically disappear with time. It remains as stubborn colouring. This will gradually fade but the tattoo never entirely vanishes.31 The tattoo therefore, whilst it may continue to remind the person tattooed that they were once recognized as tattooable, represents a permanent challenge to corporeal integrity. The tattoo is after all an undecidable: The tattoo substitutes a surface for the actual surface of the skin: but it does so in a way that plays with the knowledge that the skin has been penetrated, since the technique of tattooing in fact requires pigment to be injected beneath the surface of the skin. Thus what appears to lie on top of the skin in fact lies below it.32 The tattoo is above and below the skin, in the skin and on the skin, 31661 is abyssal. The numerals are holes within the skin. To look at the tattoo is to look through the body. The tattoo is writing within the skin and as such seems like a scar but the latter is not foreign to the body. A scar may be a response to an action which has impacted upon the body from the outside but it arises from within that body. A scar may be ugly but it is not elusive and untouchable. The scar gestures towards the abject in that it shows the skin as border to be permeable but it does not disrespect the skin. It affirms it. A scar is the writing of a wound. It is a form of narration. It tells a story of the body, for the body, through the body. The hardened skin tissue of the scar can then later be translated into more traditional narrative structures. A good example of this kind of translation is provided in a scene that forms part of Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws (1975, USA). Three men, Brody, Hooper and Quint, have set out on a boat to hunt down and kill the great white shark that has been carrying out attacks along the local shoreline. One night, whilst

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sitting around the cabin table, Hooper and Quint set about comparing their scars and relating what caused them: a moray eel, a bull shark and a thresher shark. Eventually Brody intervenes and points to a scar on Quint’s arm asking for an explanation as to its origin. It proves to be a tattoo of the U.S.S. Indianapolis which the sailor has had removed. The U.S.S. Indianapolis was a ship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the final days of the Second World War. No rescue ship was immediately forthcoming and many of the sailors who survived the initial attach were subsequently killed by sharks whilst waiting for help. Although Quint has endeavoured to have the visible reminder of his past removed, a trace remains (and, of course, the memory also remains tattooed in the mind, the flesh may forget but the mind does not). Scars, unlike tattoos, are sculpture. They form a deep cut memorialized in tissue. The scar may cause revulsion as it reminds us of the wound that it was but it can also arouse affection, be touched and touching: … when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years.33 Touching the scar, kissing it (even if that kiss is not felt by flesh rendered insensate and as such is not, is only known, only kisses the mind), forms a denying or overcoming the abject. I should loathe you but I do not, I love you. There are many examples of this love over loathing portrayed in contemporary film and literature. There is, for instance, the scene in the film Thirteen (Dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2003, USA) when Melanie (played by the actress Holly Hunter) kisses the scars left by her daughter Tracy’s (played by Evan Rachel Wood) self-mutilation. Barbara Bell’s autobiography provides another example. In this, a woman with AIDS whom Bell is ‘buddying’ kisses the scarring that marks Bell’s recent mastectomy.34 The physical contact of two people through the connective tissue of the scar seems an attempt by the one without scarring to share the wound.35 The texture of this trace of injury acts as Braille for another’s body, for another’s lips. Lips that read the embossed body and learn its past, the chronicle of lived experience that is the surface of our skin. But also, of course, lips that hide the history of a hole, conceal the cicatrix, the trace of a wound, and conceal themselves. This kind of kiss (like the French kiss) is the (con)sealing of two holes. The buss comforts because it brings back

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memories of the maternal envelope, of the body cradled and protected, of secure borders. There are no accounts of anyone kissing an Auschwitz tattoo, although such kissing must occur (if not deliberately, then by chance, during the embrace of by now ageing lovers) and have occurred. Any such kiss would, however, miss the tattoo. The lips would only kiss the surface of the skin, not the marks that lie beneath. The tattoo is untouchable. It cannot be shared. It is too deep. 31661 is a permanent reminder of a moment – a visual record of an event that was also acoustic and tactile – that is inaccessible. Tattooed numbers, numbers in a row (sometimes prefixed by a letter, here not) within an arm or a chest, replace names and also come to stand in for experiences. Firstly, the experience of losing nominal identity, as Wiesel writes of being tattooed: ‘I became A-7713. After that I had no other name.’36 The number of a survivor could, however, gradually be reclaimed after liberation. It could come to belong to the one numbered (although it was designed to dispossess) and become a part of their history. It could form an important kind of physical evidence. In Reflections, Agi Rubin writes that one of the things she has noticed when she recounts her experiences to an audience is that there are always a few people who approach her afterwards to see her number, which she suggests ‘seems to be another way for them to allow the destruction to be real, to see with their own eyes a bit of what they had only imagined’.37 There are sometimes efforts to recount this history, to cut through the skin and allow the memories to bleed out, in literature as well as spoken testimony. The writings of 31661 form an example of such an attempt. Writing skin 31661 survived the camps. 31661 unnumbered herself, renamed herself Charlotte Delbo, but the number remained in her skin.38 The tattoo, a moment of communication, both spoken and bodied: ‘Dipping her stiletto into a little bottle, a Jewish woman tattooed me, saying: “Don’t be afraid. It doesn’t hurt,” and in a scarcely audible voice: “Where did you come from? Paris? Will the war be over soon?”-“Yes, we won Stalingrad.”’39 The Jewish woman who greets the convoy, those about to be unnamed, is a nameless voice. In Convoy to Auschwitz she persists in her whispered resistance, barely audible. She spoke louder in Delbo’s skin, where possibly the only extant writing in her own hand remained, a fragile remembrance, ink in flesh, now long since gone. Delbo explicitly links skin and remembrance in the opening pages of her final book Days and Memory. The skin is memory. It registers the blows that

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impact upon it from the outside and the motions of the body beneath it. Delbo wore her skin out at Auschwitz: Explaining the inexplicable. There comes to mind the image of a snake shedding its old skin, emerging from beneath it in a fresh, glistening one. I left a worn-out skin behind at Auschwitz – it smelt bad, that skin – branded by all the blows it had received, and rediscovered myself wearing another, beautiful and clean, although with me the molting was not as fast as that of the snake’s. The visible traces came away with the old skin: the fixed stare of sunken eyes, the tottering gait, the frightened gestures. With the new skin the gestures belonging to a former life returned: the using of a toothbrush, of toilet paper, of a handkerchief, of a knife and fork, eating calmly, saying hello to people when entering a room, closing the door, standing up straight, speaking, later on smiling with my lips and, still later, smiling with my lips and my eyes at the same time. Rediscovering odors, flavors, the smell of rain. In Birkenau, rain brought out the smell of diarrhea. It is the foulest smell I know. In Birkenau, the rain beat down upon the camp, upon us, carrying soot from the crematoriums, and the smell of burning flesh. We were steeped in it. It took a few years for the new skin to fully form, to consolidate. Rid of its old skin, the snake is unchanged. It appears that I am as well. Nonetheless …40 The skin is between two times and places: the concentration camp and its aftermath. It is also between the effect of the camp upon the exterior of the body and upon its interior. This is because the skin can recall motions. When our bodies move so does our skin, creasing and smoothing as our muscles flex. The skin responds to and displays the body’s learnt comportments. We are taught appropriate movements from an early age. The way muscles operate is partly governed by the impact of social technologies. The use of the knife and fork, using the muscles in the arms and hands, is an everyday occurrence. It is also the end-product of a particular education. Muscles are ideological. This is evident from Louis Althusser’s conception of interpellation which is as much gestural as it is acoustic.41 In the moment of hailing a posture is assumed. John Mowitt emphasizes this during his discussion of interpellation in percussion. Mowitt writes that in the moment of recognition that one is being hailed, the ‘ears prick up, the head cranes, the body turns’.42 He does not develop his thinking about this gestural dimension to interpellation, however, as he is more interested in the acoustic aspect. For him

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‘interpellation is clearly a conspicuously sonoric event’.43 It is also clearly and, no less conspicuously, a muscular one. The ‘one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion’ that occurs in Althusser’s first example of interpellation requires a motional response.44 The subject needs muscles to become. This is also evident in Powers in which Kristeva refers to the gagging and spasms, the muscular exertions, which accompany abjection.45 The subject is not freed from subjection beneath the skin.46 There was a particular economy of gesture at Auschwitz. Delbo in describing her movements, the unsteady walk and the anxious demeanour, is also describing how a politics of deprivation and cruelty has impacted upon the body and is lived out within it. This politics is made visible through the skin. The tottering gait is registered by the skin and seen as such. We only usually see the skin of someone. The totter Delbo describes is the result of tiredness or starvation, yet we do not see the exhausted muscles or the empty stomach except as they are mediated through the cutaneous. The skin writes its inside. It is the skin which sways or, when threatened, cowers. These movements are only visible on the surface of body, even if motivated from inside. This is not to say that we are only skin deep but that we are only ever seen to be so. Skin mediates all gestures. In the muscle Delbo suggests that the totalitarian gestures she experienced, embodied, were gradually forgotten and replaced by the old ways of moving from before her internment. This forgetting would be made visible by and through the skin as it handled the hanky, the toothbrush and the toilet paper. The muscles that grasp do so through the skin. The new beginning is visibly only skin-deep. That there is flesh beneath the skin usually requires a leap of faith. The x-ray only shows our insides as shadow-lands. The autopsy, the bloody wound, the open-mouth, are all exceptional windows within. The gestures Delbo puts behind her are, however, never truly forgotten, merely foregone. In his book Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi discusses the different modes of perception that exist in the body. These include tactile sensibility (which is ‘exteroceptive’), visceral sensibility (which is ‘interoceptive’), and the sensibility of muscles and ligaments, which is proprioception.47 Proprioception is a folding of touch into the body, ‘enveloping the skin’s contact with the external world in a dimension of medium depth: between epidermis and viscera’.48 It translates encounters with objects into ‘a muscular memory of relationality’.49 Muscle is a ‘tissue of quotations’ formed from encounters with the external world. Jean Améry’s flinch at the first blow of

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a torturer, for example, was not forgotten by the muscles that enabled it. Equally the muscle that is part of a situation in which it should move, wishes to move, but cannot, will remember that inaction. Muscle remembers when it was not, hence, as will be explained, when it was: You who are passing by Well dressed in all your muscles How can we forgive you That are all dead 50 This quotation forms part of Delbo’s poem Prayer to the Living to Forgive them for being Alive, the first two lines are repeated three times in the course of the composition.51 The speaker of the poem resents these bodies clothed in muscle precisely because their muscles are clothing, accessories. They are upon yet apart from those who pass by. They are not experienced as such and are therefore extraneous. Usually muscle is the background to an everyday action, part of a process, such as carrying, kneeling, standing, sitting, walking or writing. It is familiar and therefore invisible. Muscle is the ‘excess of life which keeps you from feeling’.52 It is a luxury that goes unnoticed. Only during unusual exertion will muscles surface. It is when muscles fail that they become: She was clinging to the other side of the slope, her hands and feet grasping the snow-covered embankment. Her whole body was taut, her jaws tight, her neck with its dislocated cartilage straining, as were her muscles – what was left of them on her bones. Yet she strained in vain – the exertion of one pulling on an imaginary rope.53 This endeavour to climb a snow-covered bank whilst in an extremely weakened condition is an effort unknown and unknowable in the everyday. To watch people passing by without effort, to watch effortless motion, after seeing this is to be reminded of the impossibility of communicating life in a particular body to another body. The level of atrophy that Delbo describes was an end that befell many in the camps. The most extreme examples of this wasting away of the body were to be encountered in the figures of the Muselmänner, human beings ‘in the process of dissolution’.54 ‘In a final stage of emaciation, their skeletons were enveloped by flaccid, parchment like sheaths of skin, edema had formed on their feet and thighs, their posterior muscles had collapsed.’55 They were in such a state of profound malnutrition, that ‘their limbs moved slowly, hesitantly, almost mechanically’.56

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The prisoners were deliberately weakened through poor and inadequate rations, and a state of asthenia was encouraged. The resultant wreck of a body, the Muselmann, acted as the polar opposite to the Nazi ideal, the muscle man. Fascism ‘places the body at the center of its ideological aesthetics, fusing athleticism, hypermasculinity, and politics to fashion its sense of a perfect body’.57 The perfect body is solid, in shape. It has firm contours. It is a physique similar to the one described earlier that so excited Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the only difference being that in National Socialism it is primarily the male body which is to be celebrated as a source of strength. The psychological underpinning is, however, the same: a need for circumscription. The ideal body is a bounded body. It is a body with well-defined limits, one which keeps the outside out and the inside in. The Muselmann is a body turned inside out. It is the anti-body, the body against which a healthy body can define itself, the constitutive outside. James M. Glass explains this predicament: ‘I idealize and maintain my ideology by attacking the surfaces of those who threaten its cohering content, in the case of the Third Reich, the JewBody’.58 In the camps the skin of the inmates, the contour of their bodies, was placed under sustained attack. The first break into the body was the tattoo. It became a permanent insult to bodily integrity. The body was then subjected to gradual degradation, grew scabrous, becoming marked by edemas, eruptions, effusions and lesions. In the case of the Muselmänner, as Filip Müller describes, often ‘their bones had rubbed through their thin parchment-like skin, resulting in inflamed and festering wounds’.59 This assault on the skin was certain to have effects on the psyche, ‘the psychotic fragmentation of the subject suggests a damaged skin as well as a mirror without silvering’.60 The psychotic is one who has a holed skin or an imperfect identification with the image in the mirror. The dermis was continuously pierced and punctured in the camps. The skins of the inmates were rendered abject. In Powers, as already mentioned, Kristeva discusses the sections in Leviticus which link skin and impurity. These sections ‘locate impurity in leprosy: skin tumor, impairment of the cover that guarantees corporeal integrity, sore on the visible presentable surface’.61 Leprosy ‘visibly affects the skin, the essential if not initial boundary of biological and psychic individuation’.62 Anything which threatens the integrity of the skin places the self in jeopardy. This is one of the reasons why the inmates endured a crisis of subjectivity. Their borders became unstable, their shape uncertain. The consequent loss of a sense of self is encapsulated in the closing lines of Wiesel’s Night. Several weeks after his liberation from Buchenwald, time spent in hospital recovering, he is finally able to summon the strength to look at himself in the mirror: ‘From the depths of the mirror,

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a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me’.63 In the camps, the inmate, even when not reduced to the physical and mental state of the Muselmann, crosses over to the side of death, the side before and after all identity. The corpse is ‘the most sickening of wastes … a border that has encroached upon everything’.64 The inmate who has become a corpse no longer has a border. Death is the end to all shape. Delbo writes back from this death. Her writing might be read as a reshaping. The Muselmänner do not feature by name in her work but from the account she gives, the woman who strains on the imaginary rope is one step away from their state of torpor. What distinguishes her from the Muselmann is that she has a sense of purpose. Delbo wants to communicate to bodies that are in shape what it is like to become misshapen. There is nothing in the everyday, however, which can act as an adequate point of comparison. Sense of memory Memory as it is articulated in what Kristeva calls the symbolic disavows the excitations that are part of it. Memory (at least on one level) is figuration. Sensation lines all figuration. Sensation, as affect, is allied to the drives.65 The drives express themselves as both affect and idea. The idea is thought, a drive transformed into an image. The affect is a quota of excitation which can exist autonomously from the idea. Affect is drive manifesting itself as sensation rather than as representation. It is part of the semiotic underside to language (and to memory as narrated by that language) within the symbolic. Memory is therefore sinewous, connecting thought and sensation, symbolic and semiotic. Memory as thought, the first I remember, is an instance of cognition (the recognition of loss) that adopts the infant in the mother’s absence. The memory stands in for the sensation, is a surrogate. The warmth of the mother is replaced by the warmth of words. Memory is also a form of sensation however, in a way that the word as replacement is not. Memory goes deeper than words. Memory is not a representation, there is no separation, there is no back to a before. It is like an echo, a sound that returns less distinct, dulled, but is still the same sound. Memory is a downward curve, a decline. It is bottomless. There is never an occurrence and then a memory of it. There can be no opening between occurrence and remembrance, no gap. Memory is fastened to the sensation that occasioned it. It is that sensation. Memory is dwindling sensation. Améry’s first blow still resonates within him, it is not remembered; it is not called to mind, but continually resounds. The blow is

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sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground but it never goes away. Experience, as memory, has no past. It is now. We do not have a memory if memory is conceived as the remembrance of things past. The past is beyond memory, it is history. All experiences have no past, they are continuous, unbroken. We are an increase of experiences. Some begin before others but none end, or if they do end, they do so forever. Auschwitz et après, the title of Delbo’s famous trilogy, is translated as Auschwitz and After, yet the words ‘et après’ also carry the connotation ‘what next’, Auschwitz and What Next? There is an after but there is no what next. What continues to happen is Auschwitz, although it does not happen all the time. The mind fences off the memory of Auschwitz. This is a process Delbo describes in Days and Memory: The skin enfolding the memory of Auschwitz is tough. Even so it gives way at times, restoring all it contains. The will has no power over dreams. And in those dreams I see myself again, me, yes, me, as I know I was: hardly able to stand up, my throat harsh, my heart pounding my chest, frozen to the marrow, filthy, skin and bones; the suffering I feel is so unbearable, so identical to the pain endured there, that I physically feel it again, I feel it throughout my whole body which becomes a mass of suffering; and I feel death fasten on me, I feel myself dying. Luckily, in my agony I scream. My scream wakes me and I emerge from the nightmare, exhausted. It takes days for everything to get back to normal, for everything to be forced back into memory, and for the skin of memory to mend again. I become myself again, the person you are familiar with, who can talk to you about Auschwitz without exhibiting or registering any anxiety or emotion.66 For the survivor, Auschwitz is an ever-present background. Occasionally this perpetual present achieves full presence, becomes foreground. This is what occurs when the skin that surrounds memory is broken. It is the cut of remembrance. Auschwitz persists in the present as a semiotic excess, it as an excess that is continually abjected by consciousness. The survivor does not voluntarily remember Auschwitz, the sensation that is Auschwitz in the now. This is because it constitutes a dangerous memory, a threat to the self. It is a form of recollection which involves a death in life, a form in which the I is no longer. The I becomes Auschwitz. It is, therefore, not really remembrance. Remembrance describes an activity in which an I casts a backward glance at past events. The memory of Auschwitz overwhelms the I. In this state it is no longer the I that expels, the ‘I is expelled’.67 The border that keeps the

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semiotic excess in check has been breached and the self is threatened with psychosis. This is why Delbo screams. The scream is a discharge of affect, a driving out of drive. It is the expulsion of the unthinkable from the thinking being, the action that enables a return to thought. It is the nothing necessary for something to be again. Michel Chion states that the scream is ‘to do with limitlessness’.68 This is indeed the case. The I that is in danger of disintegration, the I that is losing its shape, its borders, screams in response to the boundlessness that threatens to undo it. Abjection ‘is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives’.69 It is our edge. Auschwitz was a world without edges. In the everyday we abject ‘what disturbs identity, system, order’70 whereas in the camps what disturbed identity became all pervasive, with shit and death everywhere. The skin of the prisoner was covered in lesions, inside becoming outside. Robert Antelme, as previously quoted, gives an abject description of the inmate’s sense of self: There’s blood on my shirt, there’s blood on my chest, which is red from scratched bites; scabs are starting to form, I pull them off, and they bleed. I can’t stand it any longer; I’m going to scream. I’m nothing but shit. It’s true: I’m just a piece of shit.71 In this description of his experience at Gandersheim, Antelme describes himself as shit. The I is not like shit, but is shit. In this state the ‘defilement, sewage and muck’ that the I should find repugnant have become that I.72 Those mechanisms of retching and revulsion that would normally protect the self from filth have ceased to function. In fact ‘prisoners were systematically subjected to filth’, such that defilement turned into ‘a condition of life from day to day’.73 In his book The Survivor, Terrence Des Pres reports on the response of men who were forced to lower their heads into bowls of their own excreta, this ‘defilement caused a desperation bordering on madness’.74 The men’s ‘demented screams issued from the rending of subliminal structures, in response to violation of those “cleanliness habits” which are “enforced by any culture at an early stage of training”’.75 In this abject world the inmates lived on the border of psychosis. During Man’s Search for Meaning, which includes an account of his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Victor Frankl explains how ‘disgust, horror and pity’ were emotions that he ‘could not really feel anymore’ in the camp.76 At Auschwitz and elsewhere, horror was not a threatening outside to the self. Horror became mundane. It stopped having power over the self because the self became a part of it in order to survive. The self became an aspect of

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horror, a piece of shit, a suppurating skin, a marasmic body, a death-in-life, an identity unravelling. The symbolic, the realm of thought which is usually in the ascendant, was no longer dominant in the camps. L’univers concentrationnaire, as David Rousset termed it, was a semiotic universe.77 It was drive-orientated, a universe of sensation not cognition, a universe of pain, a pain not known but become. Shrunken prose The drives could be described as the musculature of language. In this sense Delbo’s prose is scraggy, deliberately so, its leanness forms part of its sophistication. It is thin, emaciated, minimal writing. It is not orchidaceous, instead it is deceptively simple. It is repetitive. Mary Jacobus describes Delbo’s words as having ‘become colourless and wooden, leached of pleasure and affect’.78 The writing is not calculated to excite the senses. This is because Delbo wants the least possible semiotic interference in her prose. She is seeking to mend a break in the symbolic function. She writes back from semiotic excess, not into it. Céline wrote towards the semiotic, Celan wrote from within it, Delbo seeks to return from it. This modest writing, writing that is calculated, carefully composed, to be as unwriterly as possible, whilst guiding Delbo back from the camps also carries the reader into them. The reduced vocabulary and the frequent use of repetition reflect the shrunken world of Auschwitz. The camps were characterized by compression. On one level this constriction was caused by the sheer number of inmates in the camps. Wolfgang Sofsky explains the effects of this forced reduction of space: Crowding … shifts the sensual foundations of social contact. The senses of eye and ear, those main organs of social interaction, forfeit significance to the more proximal senses of touch, heat and smell. One prisoner pushed aside the next, shoved and jostled; he pressed his sharp knees into his bedmate’s body when sleeping, and irritated him with foul odors and excretions. The territories of the self – even the exterior wrappings of clothing and skin, which otherwise serve to protect the body – were constantly under threat. There were constant infringements, intrusions, and encroachments, not only because of noise, obtrusiveness, or theft, but as a result of the sheer shortage of space.79 In the crowd, hearing and seeing assumed less importance than the intimate sensations of touch and smell (the latter senses take on great importance in early infancy but are gradually superseded). The inmates found themselves

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assailed by the stink of others, jostled by their pustulant bodies. The other was incessantly disturbing the contours of the self. Such a suffocating proximity also occurred within the confines of the self. The world became as basic as possible. It was not thought but, as will be returned to later, sensed. Actions lessened in intensity, ‘we were taking shrunken steps’, as exhaustion overtook the body.80 Movement was reduced to a minimum. Motion is life, from the faintest breath to the most furious exertion. Auschwitz was designed to curtail movement, to encourage the pseudo-death of stasis, the breath-turn. Delbo’s prose does not move. It repeats as if it is a record that has become stuck beneath the stylus: Sentries begin to pace around the squares. We become conscious of ourselves, we are still breathing. We are breathing in the cold. Beyond us lies the plain. The snow sparkles in refracted light. There are no beams, only light, hard and glacial, where everything is etched in sharp outline. The sky is blue, hard and glacial. One thinks of plants caught in ice. It must happen in the Arctic region, when the ice freezes even underwater vegetation. We are frozen in a block of hard, cutting ice, transparent like a block of pure crystal. And this crystal is pierced by light, as if this light were frozen within the ice, as though ice were light. It takes a long time to realize that we are able to move within this block of ice which encloses us. We wiggle our toes within our shoes, stamp our feet. Fifteen thousand women stamp their feet yet no noise is heard. The silence is solidified into cold. We are in a place where time is abolished. We do not know whether we exist, only ice, light, dazzling snow, and us, in this ice, this light, this silence.81 In this account of a roll call, the description is disrupted by the repetitive use of particular words, most noticeably ‘light’ and ‘ice’. The prose moves forward and stays still. The repetition returns us to a constant, there is no development; the words open the reader to a plain of sameness. The prose is frozen in time. It is communication through non-communication. As mentioned earlier, for Kristeva all literary texts comprise of a phenotext and a genotext. The phenotext is allied to the symbolic and is on the side of communication. The genotext is associated with the semiotic and manifests itself as rhythm. Here despite the contention that Delbo is a writer who privileges the symbolic (e.g. the phenotext), the constant repetition of words gives the writing a rhythm that sometimes brings the genotext to the fore.82 It is the repetition, the rhythm, which communicates something about l’univers concentrationnaire,

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something about the ‘temporal law of terror’, the way it combines ‘cyclical recurrence with endless duration and suddenness or abruptness’.83 Delbo provides us here with a cyclical prose, words that return, that go nowhere, sentences that are continuous yet without continuation. The prose says nothing because there is nothing to say. Time is sensed rather than said. This is prose that means without meaning. Meaning was a luxury at Auschwitz. There are similarities here with Celan’s poetry. The writing is sparing although is does not possess the same allusive density. There is also a synaesthesic quality to the description. The lack of sound is felt rather than heard. The writing is not elliptical but the use of repetition causes Delbo’s words to move towards unmeaning. The repetition detaches the words from sense and opens them to sensation instead. It is necessary to catch something of the semiotic as part of the return to the symbolic.84 This is where the writing differs from Celan’s. Delbo is trying to reappropriate the symbolic. She writes reconciliation into being between the semiotic and the symbolic. The consequent return of the symbolic permits the experience of Auschwitz to be spoken in the Symbolic. Auschwitz was an ordered chaos. The inmates were subjected to practices designed to terrorize them, to horrify them. They were forced to live inside horror, at the edge of the Symbolic. It was a life of sensation. Thinking was an extravagance. Thinking usually operates on the side of the symbolic. It is a part of the world of ‘meaning and signification’.85 Auschwitz did not signify to the prisoner, it showed itself. Signification is a kind of interpretation. An encounter with an object is translated into meaning. That which shows itself does not mean, but is. Kristeva writes in Powers: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.86 Interpretation is a form of understanding. Auschwitz was beyond understanding. Events were not known or knowable, they were instead shown to the inmate. They had an immediacy that is absent in the everyday. The experience of thirst provides a good example of this kind of unmediated encounter. In the everyday we drink before we know what thirst is. Drinking is therefore evacuated of urgency. It takes the form of a social event,

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it is an irritation between activities, it is everything but the necessity that it is. It is taste and delectation. You never really ‘drink’ until drinking becomes you, until there is nothing else but swilling and gulping, water, lips, tongue, throat, stomach. This is drinking. This was drinking at Auschwitz. Not the words, but the acts, the feel of the liquid. Thirst is the dream of this feeling. Thirst is nothing but the want of water. It is all. ‘They … thought I had gone blind. It took me a long time later on to explain that, without being blind, I saw nothing. All my senses had been abolished by thirst.’87 The only sense that still remains is that of thirst. After her fellow prisoners have arranged (not without some risk) for her to be able to have a drink Delbo is asked if the water tastes good. She does not respond. ‘I hadn’t felt the waters taste. I drank, that’s all.’88 Taste is a kind of interpretation. It is a value judgement. It is on the side of the symbolic. Thirst is a need. It is first and foremost somatic. Thirst dries the tongue. It prevents speech, reduces the capacity for communication. After feeling thirst saying ‘I am thirsty’ no longer means thirst. Thirst has no meaning. It is felt and not at a distance (I feel thirst) but intimately (I thirst). For the one who has thirsted, the word ‘thirst’ has itself become parched, lacking. The survivor of Auschwitz sees through words and recognizes their ‘banality, conventionality, emptiness’.89 Meaning is skin-deep. A language that privileges the symbolic is superficial. It simply scrapes the surface of an experience. Auschwitz can only be reached unknowingly. It is beyond meaning, in the flesh of language. Flesh alone though is too much, too violent, unreasonable and unreadable. Delbo writes a cut, an incision. The symbolic is ascendant, it shores against the violence of the semiotic. Delbo’s reader will not fall into Auschwitz but does not rest easy above it. Words are empty because they are too familiar. ‘There are people who say, “I’m thirsty.” They step into a café and order a beer.’90 After Auschwitz, for Delbo, the word ‘thirst’ has been ‘split in two’.91 There is an Auschwitz ‘thirst’ and an ordinary ‘thirst’. After her return from the camp, ‘thirst has turned back into a word for commonplace use’.92 Delbo wants to retrieve the sensations that were attached to words at Auschwitz. She uses repetition as a way of making words strange to their selves. Through the iteration of particular words, she bodies these words. There is a compulsion not to repeat in writing, a belief that using the same words again and again and again displays a lack of linguistic ingenuity. In certain circumstances this may be true but, at times, in Delbo’s writing the ingenuity is in the repetition. The reoccurrence of particular words is an integral part of what she is trying to accomplish. Words return over and over in order to return to themselves, in order to matter:

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The whistle blows in the camp, a voice shouts: “Zell Appell” and we hear, “It’s the roll call,” and another, “Aufstehen,” but it is not the end of the night. it is not the end of the night for those who are delirious in the charnel house it is not the end of the night for the rats feeding on still living lips it is not the end of the night for the stars frozen in a frozen sky it is not the end of the night it is the hour when some shadows slip back into the walls, when other shadows go out into the night it is not the end of the night it is the end of a thousand nights and a thousand nightmares.93 The repetition of ‘it is not the end of the night’ graphically reinforces the night without end, this prose refuses progress. It also focuses the reader’s attention on the ‘not’, the ‘end’, and the ‘night’. The ‘repetition of words and word parts’ calls attention ‘to the absurd and unmotivated echoes among them at the level of syllable and letter’.94 In his essay ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, Paul de Man writes that in the works of that philosopher ‘the play of the letter and of the syllable, the way of saying (Art des Sagen) as opposed to what is being said (das Gesagte)’, is what is of decisive importance.95 In a sense this is also true of Delbo’s prose. De Man is writing of the materiality of the letter, something which emerges in similarities of sound, in alliteration, assonance, shared sibilance, in puns and rhymes. In these instances, it is not the meaning of the word which is of importance but its form, its shape, its sound. In these instances it is the matter of language that matters, not the meaning. Language is made to remember the stuff it is made of.96 The word is before it means. Auschwitz is before meaning. Delbo knows the mockery of language: words misshape things. She also knows that beneath their meaning, words are in themselves things. It is the thingness within words which she brings out through her use of repetition, the flesh of language which lies beneath the skin of meaning. The word is a name for a thing. Friedrich Nietzsche saw the name to be a skin: ‘I have unlearned with you beliefs in words and values and great names. When the Devil casts his skin does his name not also fall away? For that too is a skin. The Devil himself is perhaps – a skin’.97 Delbo wants to slough off the name so the word can show itself. She wants to reveal the word as thing, to find the colour of the word again. ‘Words lost their colour long ago’.98

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Outside narration The emergence of any meaning has required a sacrifice, an arrested potential, the death of what might have been for what is. When we feel, we feel only a facet of what we actually felt. The brief time that elapses between the application of stimulation and its registration, the ‘I feel that’, is not an empty moment but an overfull one. In his essay ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Massumi describes how research has suggested that ‘sensation is organized recursively before being linearized, before it is redirected outwardly to take its part in a conscious chain of actions and reactions.’99 We always think in retrospect when we are excited. The interpretation we give to an experience, what it means for us, is the product of a selective shaping from out of a mess of sensation. Meaning, here describing the ascription of sense to a sensation, or perhaps more properly the creation of that sensation, is reductive. Massumi proposes the time before thought as recognition to be a time of bodily thinking. Here sensation is not experienced because it is not known (in this context knowledge should be understood as the actualization of sensation). The moment between stimulation and mentation, the moment ‘which happens too quickly to have happened actually, is virtual.’100 This domain of the virtual that cannot be is ‘a realm of potential.’101 From this mess of possibilities ‘an individual action or expression will emerge and be registered consciously’.102 The expression is willed into becoming. The will bequeaths a sign. Without this signing will sensation would remain virtual. Auschwitz exists as bodily thought for Delbo. It is an intensity that underlies her. ‘Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static, temporal and narrative noise’.103 This intensity that exceeds narration and is not on the side of communication is drive energy. The drives, arranged as they are by the various constraints imposed on the body, articulate what Kristeva calls the ‘chora’. It is ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’.104 The chora can be posited in language, shaped by words, it is written of here, but it will never fit in these words. It is too uncertain. The chora is out of time and space, out of narrative, unlike. It is, however, already noise on the path to becoming sound, it is already differentiation, it has cadence. The chora is analogous to vocal or kinetic rhythm. Resonance, vibrations, reverberations, the chora shudders, judders, oscillates, and demonstrates an ordered disorder, a driving force, a motivation. The subject ferments in the semiotic chora, agitated then arrested, ‘generated and negated’.105 The semiotic continuum aligns the fragmented body of the infant, articulating ‘the connections between the (glottal and anal) sphincters in (rhythmic and intonational) vocal modulations, or those between the

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sphincters and family protagonists’.106 It is a positioning prior to positions, a preparation. There are spacings (modulations) but there is no space. Space needs an exterior, a substance to give it form. There is no severance yet, no nurturing gap between subject and object. There is no attribution of alterity to self the child, to assign it a sense of itself. The semiotic precedes the thetic phase but it is during this phase that identity or difference are asserted through the child’s gestures or mouthing. The child proposes something, points at, talks to or about something and thereby gives to that thing a fragment of the semiotic which ultimately becomes a signifier. Kristeva locates the thetic phase of the signifying process at two points in the development of the subject, ‘the mirror-phase and the “discovery” of castration’.107 These are, of course, connected. The moment the child invests in the mirror-image it shapes itself and the mirror-image: the two are cut from out of the comforting chaos of maternal plentitude. This introduces a form of lack into the child’s psychic life. Once the infant recognizes that its experience of existence, which is as a boundless confusion of puke and shit, does not mirror the smooth, seemingly controlled, contours of its image then it finds itself wanting. The later discovery of castration, a perception of lacking that echoes that of the mirror-phase, is what transforms the phallic function into the ‘symbolic function’. As Kristeva explains, ‘this is a decisive moment fraught with consequences: the subject, finding his identity in the symbolic, “separates” from his fusion with the mother, “confines” his jouissance to the genital, and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order’.108 At this moment in psychic life a gap is instituted between mother and child that enables signifier and signified to become. The entry into the symbolic is an act of distancing, the mother is placed at a remove, replaced, but this distance is founded upon an original, a necessary, proximity. The trace of the mother, the semiotic, persists in the symbolic but as its underside. In the camps, however, this separation collapses. Delbo describes the inmates as existing in a state of ‘delirium’. The separation that is required in order to witness is always retrospective. The inmate was not in the camp but was the camp. The camp shrank around those imprisoned within it until no distance existed between the two. The inmate was not a person who experienced events but was the events. In her article ‘Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et Après: The Struggle for Signification’, Renée A. Kingcaid draws attention to the self-reflexive nature of Delbo’s prose. Delbo considers where what she writes has come from. This would seem self-evident: the experiences she relates originate in the camps. It is not that simple. For Kingcaid the prose Delbo uses in the section of Auschwitz et après titled ‘Le Ruisseau’, ‘points out its own embellishments the better to

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represent, paradoxically the absolute inability to represent that defined the camps’.109 Delbo’s prose foregrounds its failure. In her description of washing herself for the first time since the shower she had on arrival two months previously, Delbo writes: So on that day, at the stream, I must have thought of the last shower, and also of the pleasure of immersing one’s body in gentle, warm water. Or perhaps I thought of all the ones who had died since our arrival without having been able to splash some water on their faces. All of this is but reported remembrances. Actually, I thought of nothing except the stream, and all my thoughts were focused on what I had to do to wash myself, to remove dirt as fast and thoroughly as possible. I was rubbing myself quickly and strongly, fortunately unable to check on the results. It would have discouraged me.110 Her thought is reduced to a minimum. She thinks of ‘nothing except the stream’ and how to ‘remove the dirt as fast and thoroughly as possible’. This limited think still appears complex, it requires a process of calculation. Delbo needs to choose the quickest and most efficient gestures as she washes. She then goes on to describe these gestures, washing her pubic hair and the skin of her thighs, one of her knees. Before she can start on her other knee the whistle blows to signal the end of the break. She gets dressed and rejoins the other inmates. Delbo adds: ‘It must have happened like this, but I have no memory of it. I only recall the stream.’111 The entire description of her washing is a deduction. It is an afterthought. The only certainty is the stream. In one sense this mirrors all history in that it requires the use of inferences. As Hayden White explains, ‘the historian must “interpret” his materials by filling in the gaps in his information on inferential or speculative grounds’.112 Delbo knows that she was at a stream; the rest of the narrative has been extrapolated from that fact. I was at a stream: I must have washed. Delbo’s account of the stream is an example of surface memory: a willing of sensation into sense. Surface memory is narrated memory. Memory taking the form of a particular narrative selected from amongst a number of possibilities. Deep memory is the stream not as it is worded, not as it is willed into words, but as it was sensed. ‘Deep memory preserves sensations, physical imprints.’113 The stream Delbo remembers is deep. The stream she describes is shallow in relation to this memory. Washing, the action of cleaning oneself, is narration. Calculation is narration. The camp was beyond such storytelling. Narrative is belated. The stream happened back then. The story of the stream came much later.

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For the survivor Auschwitz exists as a constant hum beneath the sound of the everyday. It is isolated from the present by the muffle that is the skin of memory, ‘an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self ’.114 This skin sometimes thins. Everyday language is also a skin, a symbolic skin above a semiotic flesh. Jennifer L. Geddes has written that Améry and Delbo ‘experienced in their bodies the results of the decisions people such as Eichmann made’.115 The tattoo is one instance of the bodying of a bureaucratic process, of a calculated hatred. Delbo wants to lift what is beneath the skin above it. She wants to bring deep memory to the surface, to bring the body into language. To do this she scars the symbolic. This scarring is registered as repetition. It is an invitation through rhythm, an opening of the prose to the force of the semiotic. White has written of Holocaust testimony as ‘confirmed as an index of the events about which it speaks’ in the same way as ‘a scar or a bruise’ index an event.116 Here sensation scars the skin of language. The tattoo, the deep memory beneath the skin, becomes a scar on the surface of language. Delbo’s words are cicatrices pushed up from the inside of the body into her writing. To read this scarring is to try to share the wound.

Plate 1 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Cremation at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Plate 2 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Cremation at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Plate 3 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Women being driven towards the gas chamber at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Plate 4 Anonymous (member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz), Women being driven towards the gas chamber at crematorium V of Auschwitz, August 1944. Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

6 Afterimages

To have “really seen with his own eyes” a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove that the gas chamber was used to kill at the time it was seen. The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber. Jean-François Lyotard1 If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz – that to which it is not possible to bear witness – is absolutely and irrefutably proven. Giorgio Agamben2

Bare life Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz provides an important recent philosophical reflection on testimony.3 In this work, the Muselmänner become the locus for a sustained meditation on ethics and witnessing. It is useful to situate the ideas put forward in Remnants in relation to earlier works such as Homo Sacer and also to later ones such as State of Exception. In Homo Sacer, Agamben analyses the relationship that has come to exist in modernity between zoē (bare, simple, natural life) and bios (the way of life of an individual or group).4 Agamben tracks the developing relation between bare life and

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styled life or political life through to the emergence of National Socialism. In Ancient Greece the introduction of political society prompted the disappearance of simple, animal living. Bare life was removed from sight, relegated to the domestic, but still sited within the polis. That which was excluded (zoē) was therefore also included. It was an inclusive exclusion.5 Agamben finds a link in Aristotle’s Politics between this situation and that of the acquisition of logos by the subject, an acquisition in which phonē (the voice) disappears yet is also preserved.6 Language permits judgment and as such separates man from animal, bios from zoē. The animal feels but does not judge.7 This description of the entry into language is echoed in Remnants of Auschwitz when Agamben describes how ‘the living individual appropriates language in a full expropriation alone, becoming a speaking being only on condition of falling into silence’.8 He adds that ‘there is no moment in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living being is able to render itself linguistic, transforming itself into speech’.9 The voice is an inclusive exclusion in speech. It falls silent for speech to become. Homo Sacer focuses on the inclusive exclusion of bare life as a condition and identifies it as essential to sovereign power.10 In the concluding part of the book Agamben seeks to build upon Foucault’s conception of biopolitics by relating it to National Socialism. Biopolitics is politics concerned with man’s everyday natural life, with issues such as health, leisure, and working practices. Agamben is interested in biopolitics because its emergence causes the sovereign imperative ‘to make die and let live’ (asserting the right to kill) to be replaced by the aspiration ‘to make live and to let die’ (privileging the care of life).11 As Foucault had explained, ‘the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life’.12 This administration of bodies marks the incorporation of zoē into the political. Bare life is now the stuff of politics. Agamben suspects that ‘the exemplary place of modern biopolitics’ is ‘the politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century’, a politics which he believes Foucault did not consider.13 In the final chapter of Homo Sacer he analyses the role of the concentration camp within the politics of National Socialism. The camps function as a state of exception. As Agamben explains, the state of exception ‘allows for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order’.14 It provides an outside to the law from within the law therefore enabling the law to be. It is a constitutive outside held inside: an inclusive exclusion. In its modern manifestation the state of exception is best defined as a juridical pause. It is the law placed in suspension. In Homo Sacer, Remnants,

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and State of Exception, Agamben provides Hitler’s 1933 proclamation of the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State as an example of such a pause.15 The decree suspended many of the laws which were enshrined in the Weimar constitution in order to protect civil liberties. It was never repealed whilst Hitler was in power which thereby makes it possible to understand the entire Third Reich as a state of exception. It is in this sense that Agamben contends that ‘modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’.16 The essence of the concentration camp ‘consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction’.17 The state of exception becomes the norm. Those who were confined there ‘moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared’.18 The camp as an exemplary space of legal suspension was ‘an absolute nonplace with respect to the law’.19 The inmates were interned outside the law. They were deprived of political status and thus of legal protection. There was no longer any law to intervene in the interactions between guard and inmate. In the state of exception, the legal body which supplements the living body in the everyday and which mediates all encounters with it ceased to exist. Instead, the prisoner was ‘reduced completely to naked life’.20 Their body was placed outside the law. The law provides an important framework for judging actions. Laws delimit what is bad. The lawbreaker is the criminal. In the camps there were no laws to break. The prevention of the perpetration of atrocities (they cannot be called criminal acts within this context) no longer depended upon the force of law but upon ‘the civility and ethical sense’ of those who are temporarily acting as sovereign.21 In the camp ‘bare life and the juridical rule enter[ed] into a threshold of indistinction’.22 Bodies were stripped of the protection of law, a protection which is, at least partly, linguistic. The dispossession of legal status can also be understood as a dispossession of language. The possession of language, as discussed earlier, is a part of what makes man human rather than animal. This dispossession is therefore a partial denuding of humanity. The state of exception that is the concentration camp produces bodies no longer protected by the law, bodies reduced to bare life. Bare life is ‘a threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and fact into law, and in which the two planes become indistinguishable’.23 Usually a state of

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exception arises as a response to a factual situation (a public revolt, for example) but in the camps the situation is produced as a result of the exception. The state of exception no longer occurs after the fact but, instead, law and fact complicate. This complication is materialized in the camp inmate. Bare life is not, therefore, natural life. It is not zoē. It is a liminal state occurring between bios and zoē, between life styled by law and natural life, between language and non-language. The most extreme example of bare life in the camps is embodied by the Muselmann. In this space the Muselmann, the unthinking and automatic body, an abject lesson in bare life, becomes ‘the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum’, after which there is only the beyond of politics, death.24 The Muselmann is ‘the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of bio-power’.25 It does not speak or think. It is no longer human yet it is not outside the human. It is the inhuman within the human. The inhuman is the inclusive exclusion that constitutes our humanity. It is a part of us yet apart from us. The Muselmann is ‘the threshold between the human and the inhuman’.26 In the Muselmann, the inhuman and the human (the usually inseparably separate) come close to conjoining. For as long as there is separation between bios and zoē, however, the human persists. It exists in the gap between the two. In The Open, Agamben suggests that in Kojève’s reading of Hegel ‘man is not a biologically defined species, nor is he a substance given once and for all; he is, rather, a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that every time separate , at least virtually, “anthropophorous” animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in it’.27 Man is the place and the result of division. The human is produced through a process of sublation in which the inhuman is negated and preserved. In the concentration camps, however, ‘an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman […] ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin’.28 Agamben describes the Muselmann, as the ‘non-human who obstinately appears as human’ and ‘the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman’.29 The camps produced a figure in the Muselmann who threatened to close the gap between the human and the inhuman. To successfully close this gap would be to do away with the dyad that grounds the dialectical process which founds the human. The Muselmann represents ‘a point at which human beings, while apparently remaining human beings, cease to be human’.30 The Muselmann appears to be an inhuman human being, a closed gap. Whilst the human is still present, however, the inhuman is not. Or, to put it another way, the human is, so long as we can say: ‘This is the inhuman’. If we recognize that which we call inhuman then we must recognize a part of ourselves

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in that inhumanity. We are not truly seeing that inhuman part of us which allows us to be, the inhuman that grounds our humanity, the impossible that makes us possible. The Muselmann is in some senses unknowable but crucially not in terms of recognition, it is not unrecognizable. That we recognize the Muselmann as something that used to be someone means that the ‘someone’ that once was still is. This was a man, rather than this was … The ethics Agamben advances is one founded on the principal of recognition. To truly become inhuman (hence not inhuman but some other silent term) would be to become unrecognizable. The earth that Gitta Sereny describes walking upon at Sobibor approaches this beyond of the human.31 Only gradually is it recognized as ash. Ash is perhaps the remnant that Agamben should confront – should attest to – but he cannot.32 Divisions Agamben warns us that to deny the humanity of the Muselmänner ‘would be to accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture’.33 For Agamben the Muselmann is beyond the reach of ethology in its current form. He believes that an ethics which formulates the human in terms of an obligatory communication or in terms of dignity is an ethics that is unable to recognize and account for the Muselmann. Such an ethics is inadequate. In an astute critique of this aspect of Agamben’s thinking, Dominick LaCapra asks whether ‘the idea that Auschwitz radically delegitimates all preexisting ethics and all present appeals to them, including all notions of decency and dignity, paradoxically runs the risk of granting a posthumous […] victory to the Nazis’.34 Agamben, however, does not address this difficulty. He calls for a new ethics, an original means of accountability which is equal to the task of attesting to the Muselmann. Agamben’s appeal for a means of accountability equal to the task of bearing witness to the Muselmänner resonates strongly with Judith Butler’s recent work on ethics. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler writes that ‘when we come up against the limits of any epistemological horizon, and realize that the question is not simply whether I can or will know you, but whether “you” qualify within the scheme of the human within which I operate’ then ethics requires that ‘we risk ourselves precisely there, at the moments of our unknowingness, when what conditions us and what lies before us diverge from one another, when our willingness to become undone constitutes our chance of becoming human, a becoming whose necessity knows no end’.35 Butler seems to be suggesting here that at times it is ethically necessary to embrace the inhuman. This is a sentiment which echoes Agamben’s own

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thinking which requires bearing witness to the Muselmann, breaking with the violence of ethical silence, through speaking the inhuman in the human. Testimony necessitates an impossible convergence, such that ‘the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification’.36 This means that there is no subject of testimony rather ‘every testimony is a field of forces incessantly traversed by currents of subjectification and desubjectification’.37 This desubjectification is a loss of language within language, a speaking of the unspoken, the recognition of the inhuman in the human. Jay Bernstein holds the belief, echoed here, that for Agamben the inhuman therefore plays ‘something like the role of différance in [Jacques] Derrida: a necessary condition for the possibility of meaning that is equally its impossibility’.38 The human can never be fully present to itself. Self-presence or self-sameness is an illusion. Bios cannot coincide with zoē. Testimony thus becomes a bearing witness to the ‘impossibility of conjoining the living being and language, phōnē and logos, the inhuman and the human’, a bearing witness to the impossibility that makes any and all testimony possible.39 It becomes a testament to the gap, the space that produces a relation between, albeit in the form of a non-relation. This gap, the impossible conjunction, the disjunction, is bodied by the Muselmann. This figure manifests both the inhuman capacity to survive the human and the human capacity to survive the inhuman. The Muselmann is seemingly the impossible made possible, the complete witness. For Agamben the ‘paradox here is that if the only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed, this means that the identity between human and inhuman is never perfect and that it is not truly possible to destroy the human, that something always remains’.40 It is at this point, when Agamben identifies the witness as a remnant, that an attempt to break with the tenets of deconstruction takes place. In his essay ‘Never Before, Always Already’, Alexander García Düttmann provides a useful summation of Agamben’s reasoning behind positing deconstruction as complicit with sovereignty.41 Sovereignty rests upon the state of exception, the inclusive exclusion which authorizes it. Deconstruction reinforces sovereignty in ‘that it interprets being as a relation of undecidability to which a being must and yet cannot relate’.42 The undecidable is in this sense comparable to the state of exception as it occurs within sovereignty. As the unrelated relation it is like the inclusive exclusion. To move beyond the category of relation, to abandon our abandonment to the law, to sovereignty, requires ‘nothing less than an attempt to think the political-social factum no longer in the form of a relation’.43 The path to the relationless (the unrelated is relational in its very unrelatedness to the relation) lies in the remnant.

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The remnant is, of course, relational. In the Muselmann the human continues to relate to the inhuman as a part of a figure that has ceased to be human whilst not having become inhuman. The Muselmann as remnant does not, however, relate to something (e.g. human to inhuman) but is that very relation (it is the gap between the human and the inhuman). Agamben seeks to explain this in Remnants, firstly describing the remnant of Israel as that which is ‘neither the whole people nor a part of the people but, rather the noncoincidence of the whole and the part’, and then the remnants of Auschwitz as those who are ‘neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved’ but ‘what remains between them’.44 Düttmann explains that ‘in order not to relate, and to break with the “logic of sovereignty” as well as with the bad infinity of iterability, of a perpetual, always renewed and always frustrated relating, one must retain oneself in the relating of the relation’.45 To maintain oneself in the relating to relation appears similar to the mastery of relation which Agamben describes in The Open. In this mastery which derives from the Benjaminian model of a ‘dialectic at a standstill’ what is decisive is ‘only the “between”, the interval or […] the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence’.46 The ethical subject is therefore a witness who relates to the interval that is the relation. Such a witness resists the efforts of biopower to separate the human and the inhuman, their witnessing does not relate to either of those terms but rather to the very fact that they are in a relation. The witness does not decide between the two terms but rather resides between them. Through this residence the witness is able to resist sublating either of the terms. Ethics in Remnants therefore centres upon situating testimony in this connection. The production of such a testimony ensures the preservation of this relation. In Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Jenny Edkins emphasizes that the ultimate aim of biopower is to sever all connection between the human and the inhuman. Testimony as Agamben conceives of it, however, demonstrates the failure of this endeavour to divide. This means that ‘in its very form, testimony contests sovereign power’.47 For Agamben, the ultimate achievement of National Socialism would be the (of necessity, violent) separation of the human and the inhuman. The witness who acknowledges the Muselmänner, however, refuses such a separation by attesting to a persisting relation. The only true separation is the destruction of any sense of relation. It would require that the Muselmann become neither inhuman nor human but instead something beyond that binary. The relation is not to be confused with an undecidable. It is not an aporia. The neither/nor of the undecidable in deconstruction is relational but it is not the relation. The relation rather exists within the undecidable.

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The zone of indistinction that Agamben is proposing – the remnant – separates from separation by becoming that separation.48 Agamben is proposing a witness who testifies to the relating that enables a situation of neither/ norism to arise. In the undecidable, neither relates to nor and neither/nor relates to either/or. The undecidable is decidedly multiple (prior to the decision which causes it to obsolesce) whereas the relation is what it is. It is its that-it-relatedness and nothing more. It is singular. The idea of a relating to relation, of the importance of the idea of the remnant, is developed in far greater depth in Agamben’s later work Le temps qui reste which is deeply imbricated with Remnants. Le temps qui reste is an extended exegesis of the first line of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (a quotation from Romans (coupled with one from Isaiah) opens Remnants). In Le temps qui reste, Agamben explores the idea of messianic temporality as it is articulated in Romans. Messianic time is radically contracted time. It is time as remnant. The remnant is the time that remains between time and its end. It is a time between times.49 Agamben describes it briefly in Remnants of Auschwitz as ‘neither historical time nor eternity but, rather, the disjunction that divides them’.50 Eternity is time’s end. He does not consider the possibility that Auschwitz itself might be said to constitute an effort to establish this time between times, a possibility advanced by Edith Wyschogrod in Spirit in Ashes. Wyschogrod contends that the time of the death-camps is modelled on the time between times, the time of the inmate appearing to be one that is between times. The death-world ‘creates a spurious present; a present without past or future’.51 As such, it is ‘a simulacrum of end-time’.52 This resonates with Arthur A. Cohen’s description of the Holocaust as tremendum; as ‘an abyss of history […] a gap in normal time, no less a gap, no less a decisive gap than would be the messianic redemption’.53 Auschwitz can be understood as a time between times, which would mean in Agamben’s terms that all the inmates are, in a sense, living within a remnant. By extension, it could be argued that all survivor testimony would therefore relate to relation or, at least, to a simulating of this relation. In the between times that is messianic time the quality of becoming what remains is one that is shared by the newly emergent messianic law. Biblical law acts primarily through the institution of division, the creation of separation.54 The fundamental separation of Jewish law is that between Gentile and Jew, the Jew’s circumcision marks this division. Paul overcomes this pivotal division through instituting another division, that between flesh and spirit. He separates separation: ‘For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in

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the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God’ (Romans 2: 28-29). The introduction of this new division within the divided causes the separation of the faithful founded in the flesh to become uncertain. The circumcised may not be Jews. The uncircumcised may not be not-Jews. The body is not the guarantor of faith, the spirit is. For Agamben this gesture represents the creation of a remnant, the Jews and the non-Jews do not include everyone; people remain outside of either category. This remnant, the not not-Jew, falls under messianic law. This is not a universal category. The not not-Jew does not encompass all the Jews nor all the Gentiles. Nor does the not not-Jew identify a particular part of the Jews or Gentiles rather it describes the impossibility of self-coincidence for either identity.55 Pauline thought is not concerned with identifying an underlying unity between divided peoples but rather with dividing division itself and thereby rendering the original division inoperative. The remnant is the result of this dividing division. In its prevention of coincidence the remnant appears similar to Derrida’s concept of the trace as it names the impossibility of the sign achieving total presence and presentness. Agamben suggests that Derrida’s thinking places the primacy of presence and the signifier into question within philosophy but does not act upon signification in general. Deconstruction leaves the everyday sign untouched.56 In Agamben’s opinion, deconstruction presupposes the absence of presence and the impossibility of the abolition of the sign. It functions on the premise that beyond absence and presence, between absence and presence, non-presence continues to signify. Non-presence thereby serves as an architrace, an ‘archiphoneme’ between presence and absence. This archiphoneme, as the degree zero of signification, is an originary memory within deconstruction.57 It is the remnant of an origin that cannot be admitted. Deconstruction differs from the dividing division in that it is an infinitely deferred hermeneutics. Dividing division is not a process that will eventually reach an ur-division, an undividable, but it is a process that seeks accomplishment. In this, the fact that it is a means to an end, it differs from deconstruction. The separating of separations is a form of preparation for the telos that is the end of time. For Agamben, deconstruction (in its infinite deferral of full-presence) is a blocked messianism. The aim of dividing division is to open the way to an eventual fulfilment of the messianic promise. The time will arrive at which time ends. To bear witness to the Muselmann is to relate to relation which is a means of dividing division. It is testimony that emerges from out of a gap between bios and zoē, between the human and the inhuman, between language and non-language. The originality of this, Agamben’s conception of testimony, is questionable with the idea of rendering divisions inoperative, for example,

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appearing similar to Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the ‘uneventfulness of the neutral’.58 Blanchot’s inertia invites a similar stilling of the dialectic. It is, however, to the work of Jean-François Lyotard that Agamben seems primarily to be responding to in Remnants. In his preface, Agamben describes the aporia of Auschwitz as ‘the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension’.59 The aporia of Auschwitz is the gap it initiates, a gap that occurs when reconciliation between genres of discourse (such as, in this instance, factuality and actuality) in response to an event proves impossible. Lyotard calls this irreconcilable difference a differend. The differend The differend is a conflict of phrasing. For Lyotard, all witnessing requires the witness to choose a phrase. A phrase links on to an event (an event which is itself a phrase). It is a kind of supplement. This linkage comes at the expense of other possible linkages, of other possible phrases. There are always a number of possible ways of linking to each phrase; there are a number of genres of discourse from which a linkage might be formulated. ‘A phrase, which links and which is to be linked, is always a pagus, a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking’.60 The differend occurs when an event in its singularity cannot be followed by a singular response. It occurs when negotiations over the way to bear witness to an event ‘cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments’.61 The differend is ‘the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be’.62 Lyotard famously provides the example of the revisionist historian Faurisson who claims that as there are no eye witnesses able to conclusively prove that they have seen a gas chamber it can thus be extrapolated that the gas chambers did not exist. Faurisson insists on interpreting the silence of the survivors as testament to the non-existence of the gas chambers. He insists on applying the rules of the cognitive genre to the existence of the gas chambers in such a way that they can only be found not to have existed.63 Lyotard, however, points out that this silence on the part of the survivors ‘can just as well testify against the addressee’s authority (we are not answerable to Faurisson), against the authority of the witness himor herself (we, the rescued, do not have the authority to speak about it), [or] finally against language’s ability to signify gas chambers (an inexpressible absurdity)’.64 To link onto Auschwitz with the negative phrase that is silence is to produce a differend. The differend is an appeal. It is an event

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that calls to be phrased. It demands the finding of an idiom appropriate to its expression. This idiom cannot be found in philosophy in its current form. After Auschwitz philosophical thought in the form of speculative dialectics is impossible. Lyotard states that if Auschwitz is a model of negative dialectics, as Adorno has claimed, then it ‘will be necessary “after Auschwitz” for thought to consume its determinations like a cow its fodder or a tiger its prey, that is, without leaving a result’.65 Hegelian dialectics (as conventionally understood) are inadequate to Auschwitz, for, in this context, the possibility of sublation would seem perverse. Auschwitz belabors the negative. The event cannot be overcome in a movement towards a higher unity. Lyotard explains that for Adorno the event modelled a ‘non-negatable negative’ which could not be redoubled into a result.66 Speculative dialectics does not provide an adequate form of phrasing for the event. It is therefore partially as a response to Adorno’s and Lyotard’s critique of the notion of dialectical sublation that Agamben calls for a testimony that relates to relation. The Muselmann becomes the idiom through which a witness is able to attest to Auschwitz because no negation takes place. Testimony is situated in a lacuna between terms. The witness speaks ‘only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking’.67 The witness speaks through not-speaking. This leads to a testament that ‘cannot be denied’.68 Examples of this undeniable testimony are then provided in the coda to the book. Agamben’s thinking is unsettling in that he suggests removing Auschwitz and the gas chambers, ‘if the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann’, in order to remove the deniable.69 This may indeed cause the end of denial but at considerable contextual expense. What remains, the figure of the Muselmann (the trope that is the argument), may be undeniable, however, this is perhaps because it is too insubstantial to engender disavowal. It is not testimony as it would commonly be recognized but rather an exercise in thought. The accounts provided by Muselmänner in the coda, for example, do not mesh with Agamben’s description of them. As Robert Eaglestone has noted, in these testimonies ‘there are suggestions the Muselmann maintained an interest in food, warmth, and survival’.70 The testimonies do not attest to the Muselmann as it is conceived of by Agamben. They refer not to a state of living-death but to a state such as that referred to by Delbo in which basic impulses overraw luxuries of reflection.71 For Agamben, the Muselmänner represent the degradation of death. They are neither dead nor alive but exist ‘as the inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area’.72 This description does not seem to square, for example, with Lucjan Sobieraj’s account of his time as a Muselmann

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scrounging potato skins and then spreading them with jam and eating them. Sobieraj recounts: ‘A pig wouldn’t have eaten them, but I did. I’d chew on them until I felt sand in my teeth’.73 This account is of a man who felt he lost his dignity when he was starving. Such a loss, however, cannot be equated with living-death. Sobieraj’s motivation is to sustain his life. He is still striving to survive as are others who self-identify as having being a Muselmann. Some make claims to have been reduced to a state of thoughtlesness yet, as in the case of Bronislaw Goscinski, then go on to recount how they knowingly, cunningly evaded having to work.74 This kind of behaviour does not match Primo Levi’s vision of the Muselmann, which has greatly influenced Agamben, as someone ‘whose face and eyes do not betray even a trace of thought’.75 These are, at least in some instances, not testimonies of inmates reduced to bare life but rather of individuals engaging in extreme forms of behaviour for a solitary purpose, to survive. This was life without ornamentation. It had a singular aim. It does not, however, sound like the non-life of the Muselmänner as it is envisaged by Agamben. He describes the Muselmann as ‘the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum’.76 The testimonies in the coda do not attest to this state of being. Remnants is not a work which tries to bear witness to the matter of Auschwitz but rather to the limits of a particular way of thinking. Agamben’s response to the problem of Holocaust denial, his call to bear witness to the Muselmann, is one formulated in answer to a reading of Lyotard framed in terms of a context of sayability and unsayability, of speech and silence. He believes Lyotard encourages the acceptance of an impossibility of witnessing. In fact, Lyotard argues that Auschwitz is an event without an idiom appropriate to it but even the absence of idiom that constitutes a differend is a form of saying. Agamben’s interpretation of Lyotard’s stance as one endorsing unsayability is therefore contentious, problematic, mistaken. There are, however, numerous other works on testimony and the death-camps which predate Remnants, such as those by Lawrence Langer and Edith Wyschogrod, which also explore issues of unsayability. The gap In Holocaust Testimonies, Langer examines the value of video-testimony as a means of bearing witness.77 He understands spoken testimony to be less mediated, more immediate, than literary accounts of the Shoah. Holocaust literature is too stylized. Langer writes that ‘written memoirs, by the very strategies available to their authors, style, chronology, analogy, imagery, dialogue, a sense of character, a coherent moral vision, strive to narrow this

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space, easing us into their unfamiliar world through familiar (and hence comforting?) literary devices’.78 Writing involves ‘the conscious choice of phrasing one’s words’.79 Video testimony is less reflexive and hence, for Langer, less mediated. Mediation opens gaps between the experience of the event and efforts to articulate that experience. Langer wants to bridge these gaps. Holocaust Testimonies explicitly sets out ‘to undo a negation, the principle of discontinuity which argues that an impassable chasm permanently separates the seriously interested auditor and observer from the experiences of the former Holocaust victim’.80 The notion of unsayability, the belief that the experience cannot be preserved and communicated through speech, is not countenanced. The addressee may, however, institute a self-created gap as a form of protection against the recounting of the event.81 During the discussion of what he terms ‘humiliated memory’, Langer recognizes the problem of translation that exists for the survivor. He suggests that at times memory exists as content without a form.82 This resonates with Lyotard’s work. Memory can sometimes exist as a differend for which there is not an adequate idiom, as an experience for which words are found wanting. The words that do exist cannot carry the feelings. The phrase cannot be followed. This implies that there is an element of unsayability to the event. The language of the present is informed by contemporary value systems which make it impossible for the survivor to ‘establish meaning through analogy’.83 To achieve the requisite analogical potential would require revising the languages of history and moral philosophy.84 Langer’s work prefigures Agamben’s in that it acknowledges the insufficiency of contemporary moral language for giving an account of Auschwitz. Holocaust Testimonies concedes that the task of reformulating moral language may be an impossible one. It opens up the possibility of a break between the world of the camps and the present and, by extension, between the inhuman and the human. Langer’s understanding of witnessing, however, resides almost exclusively on the side of meaning. For him, memory resides in the sense of the words not in their mode of delivery. It is what is said rather than how it is said that is of prime importance. Towards the end of Holocaust Testimonies, Langer does acknowledge the ‘manner of presentation’ of Holocaust testimony in addition to its content but in his accounts of testimony throughout the book he is attentive to sense at the expense of non-sense.85 He is less interested in the rhythms and tones of the testimonies than in their words. The silences, the stutters, the slowing and speeding up of delivery, the placing of stresses: those aspects of speech which are integral to communication, but which do not communicate in any simple way, hold little interest for Langer. Nor, by extension, does the potential absence of those aspects: the flat, monotone delivery.

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Holocaust Testimonies does not admit the style of speech. It could be argued that the conception of language employed within this context is one which pays insufficient attention to drive investment (or lack of it) in testimonial texts. This insufficiency is one shared by Agamben. In Spirit in Ashes, Wyschogrod also addresses the relationship between language and testimony. Wyschogrod distinguishes between death-worlds and life-worlds. In the death-world ‘a massive intervention in a taken-forgranted system of meanings’ takes place as a result of which ‘new meanings become affixed to the body through the systematic substitution of pain for the ordinary complex of meanings that constitutes our corporeal transactions’.86 Ordinary language is replaced by a new language of pain which ‘lies outside any linguistic referential system’ and which is ‘first noticed as a gap in linguistic possibility’.87 The inmates have never encountered experiences analogous to those in the camps. Their life-world vocabulary of experience proves inadequate in the death-world. They possess the vocabulary of a lifeworld where ‘thirst’ is a minor irritant, where ‘hunger’ is easily sated, where ‘pain’ is uncommon and ‘death’ is a rarity. In the life-world death means because it is infrequent; it constitutes an event. In the life-world only the doctor, the undertaker and the grave-digger are familiar with death and even then it is a respected death. It does not pass unnoticed. The camp inmates live in a world which they cannot contextualize in these terms. Theirs is a compressed space. It is a reduction of experience. Wyschogrod suggests the linguistic process reflects this shrinkage.88 In the death-world the old language persists but it becomes a palimpsest. It is overwritten by new and contradictory meanings. The number of words remains the same but the meaning of each word is multiplied. Wyschogrod proposes that ‘a systematic effort is made to create confusion in regard to accepted, takenfor-granted meanings by developing opposed meanings in order to produce the widest possible discrepancy between alleged and actual significations’.89 The word ‘work’, for example, is used cynically ‘to suggest productive effort even though […] it means unremitting hard labor’.90 As Blanchot explains in The Writing of the Disaster, for the camp inmate ‘work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying’.91 In the life-world the word ‘work’ means an activity through which a living is earned. In the death-world work becomes instead a means to end life. In the death-world the old signification of each word endures but every word also comes to signify death: ‘for each and every signifier the range of obsolete meanings is retained together with the new signified, death’.92 The old language becomes a dead language. The language of our everyday existence, of the life-world, is alive and expansive. It would need to collapse inwards to capture the experience of the death-world.

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Wyschogrod recognizes that for the death-world to succeed it needs witnesses: ‘the scheme of annihilation must exhibit to a token number of victims the nullity of their symbolic structures, to force them to comprehend their loss’.93 There must be death and there must be some living-dead. The reference here is not, however, to the figure of the Muselmann. The living-dead who bear witness to their own death do so consciously. They are not unthinking. They conceive of themselves as animals and excrement. They think of themselves as base but this thinking prevents them from embodying bare life. The death-world ‘attempts to divest (the inmate) of the complexity of consciousness and reduce him as far as possible to animal status’.94 Wyschogrod gives the example of Victor Frankl but we could equally refer to Antelme’s account of Gandersheim as mentioned earlier. These are inmates who see themselves as inhuman, who confirm the perception held of them by their oppressors, but who still see their selves. They still have the capacity to think. They think but not reflexively. There is no cogito ergo sum. There is, instead, ‘I think I am not’. Looking back This form of self-perception resonates with Laub’s view, mentioned during the analysis of the Scrolls of Auschwitz, that there were no ‘I’ witnesses from within the event. It describes a period of time during and ‘after’ the Holocaust in which Laub suggests it was impossible to bear witness. Attesting to the event was not possible because, for Laub, there was nobody who was in a position to do so. Those who were not interned within the death camps refused to fulfil the role of outsider-witness that was required of them; ‘most actual or potential witnesses failed one-by-one to occupy their position as a witness’.95 Those who were within the camps, as was discussed earlier, did not possess sufficient detachment to bear witness objectively to what was unfolding around them. They could not purportedly escape the trapping roles ‘either of the victim or the executioner’.96 Laub writes that it was not possible for those inside the event to ‘step outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place, and provide an independent frame of reference through which the event could be observed’.97 For Laub, the damage to the self sustained by the witness in the death camps must at least partially be undone before the event that has been recorded unconsciously can be recounted. It is through their testimonies that the survivors become rehumanized, become persuaded that they are not, in fact, inhuman. Bearing witness is therefore as much a process of restoration

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of self as a record of the event. The survivor accounts Laub is referring to are like the testimonies produced from inside the event in that each is limited in scope. They differ, however, in that they are produced and situated within a general context. Over the intervening years the gaps in knowledge which necessarily afflicted those who endeavored to bear witness from inside the event have substantially been filled. Laub and Wyschogrod both recognize that the inmates in the camps endured an assault on the self which significantly impacted upon their ability to bear witness. The inmates who no longer had a secure sense of self became incapable of bearing witness. If, as Laub suggests, witnessing is only possible after a return to self-hood, a return that is enabled by the process of giving testimony (a somewhat paradoxical notion), then a central aspect of the camp experience, the loss of self, drops out of the account. There is a gap between the death-world and the life-world which must be crossed before witnessing is possible. This crossing entails losing the experience that is loss of self. There is therefore a contextual blindspot in testimony of the kind honoured by Laub. The paucity of context in Remnants forms one of the key criticisms levelled against Agamben. Jay Bernstein, Geoffrey Hartman and Dominick LaCapra all rightly decry the loss of context which proves necessary for Agamben to advance his arguments in Remnants.98 They emphasize the frames of reference which disappear because of Agamben’s choice to focus almost exclusively on the figure of the Muselmann. In his first critique, Bernstein writes of his repugnance at Agamben’s inability to ‘veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain: from the victims to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to the ethical dispositions of those set upon reducing the human to the inhuman’.99 He later produced a second critique which suggests the failure of Agamben’s conception of witnessing lies in its incapability to give an account of the relation between philosophy and the Holocaust.100 LaCapra is also critical of Agamben’s failure to inquire ‘into the ideology and practice of perpetrators in the creation of the historical state of affairs that brought the Muselmann into being’.101 Hartman is more disconcerted by Agamben’s emphasis on remembering the Muselmänner at the expense of the ‘thousands of survivor testimonies that actually exist’.102 For Hartman, the testimony that Agamben gives privilege to is too narrow although he finds some consolation in the testimonies included at the end of Remnants.103

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The remains of a day in August One aspect of Auschwitz’s context that is missing from Remnants is that of the Sonderkommando whose writings were discussed earlier. Agamben briefly mentions their existence in his preface and in the opening chapter, where he cites Primo Levi’s comments on Miklos Nyiszli’s account of a football match that took place between the SS and the Sonderkommando, but then fails to respond to Levi’s imploration not to ‘close one’s mind’ to thinking about these squads.104 The special squads are not easily transformed into a remnant and cannot be integrated into the specific argument Agamben wants to make about biopolitics. They are therefore extraneous to Remnants. Here, however, what Agamben loses by ‘closing one’s mind’ to these particular inmates will be considered from the perspective of the series of four photographs, already briefly referred to, taken by a Greek Jew called Alex (who worked in one of the squads) one day in August 1944 to provide evidence of the atrocities that were being committed at Auschwitz. The film from which these pictures were developed was smuggled out of Auschwitz hidden in a tube of toothpaste.105 These photographs are discussed at length by Didi-Huberman. Two of the images depict members of the Sonderkommando at ‘work’ (Plates 1–2), a third shows a group of naked women on their way to the gas chamber (Plate 3), the final picture is almost abstract, treetops and light, an exhaustion of content (Plate 4). Here is DidiHuberman’s description of the taking of the first two photographs: The terrible paradox of this black chamber, in order to get the camera out of the bucket, to set the view-finder, to bring it close to his face and to take this first sequence of images, the photographer must have had to hide himself in the gas chamber which had just been – and then perhaps not completely – emptied of its victims. He sets himself back in this gloom. The angle, the darkness in which he keeps himself, protecting him. Growing emboldened, he shifts position and moves forward: the second view is a little more frontal and slightly closer. Riskier then. But also paradoxically more staged: cleaner. As if fear had briefly disappeared in the face of the importance of the task, to snatch a picture. One can see, in fact, the everyday work of the other members of the team, that of snatching from the bodies, which are still lying on the ground, their final human resemblance. The gestures of the living speak of the weight of the bodies and of the work to be done within the immediacy of the decisions to be taken: pull, drag, throw. The smoke behind is that of the pits used for burning the dead: bodies laid in staggered rows to a depth of one and a half metres, the cracklings of grease,

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the smells, the shriveling of human flesh, all those things that Filip Müller speaks of, are here, in that veil of smoke that photography has made permanent for us. Behind is the wood of silver birches. The wind is blowing to the north, perhaps the north-west.106 These photographs are taken from within the gas chamber, a part of the chamber is visible, the blackness that frames the squad disposing of the bodies. Janina Struk has written that ‘from a window a few photographs were taken of the burning pyres and women being sent to the gas-chamber’.107 This appears to be incorrect. The black frame marks the entry way to the chamber. It is clearly not a window but a door. This is made more evident in the second, clearer photograph, the one which Struk chooses to reproduce in her account of the images. This blackness is both more and less than the outline of an entry and an exit. This emptiness in the image is the gas chamber. It is masonry, it is matter. Yet what it is cannot be seen; opaque, obscure, almost nothing. Didi-Huberman describes how often, when they are reproduced, these two photographs are recentred. The black expanse is removed in a process of purifying ‘the substance of the image of its non-documentary force’.108 This action is reminiscent of Agamben’s gesture in Remnants where he sheds the camps of all contexts that do not lend weight to his argument. The darkness is rejected because it is perceived to interfere with the integrity of the images. It shows us nothing. Didi-Huberman writes that this: […] black expanse which surrounds the spectacle of the corpses and the pits, this expanse where nothing is visible gives, in reality, a visual marker as precious as all the rest of the exposure. The expanse where nothing can be seen is the space of the gas-chamber, the dark chamber where it was necessary to retreat to bring to light the work of the Sonderkommando outside, above the incineration pits. This black expanse gives us then the situation itself, it is the space of possibility that allows the photographs to exist.109 The blackness provides the trace of the conditions of possibility that made the photographs achievable, concealment within the gas chamber. It is, of course, Didi-Huberman who brings to light this context and exposes the violence that inheres in the reframing of the image. He returns to Alex the danger of his endeavour. To crop the image is to ‘make as if Alex was able to take his photographs without risk in the open air’.110 It is to make the photographs safe. These images were the end-result of a great amount of risk-taking. The

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returning of this darkness is important for other reasons. The black frame forms part of the noise of the photographs. These images are edged by horror: the blackness is the boundary that permits the photograph to be. To remove this ambiguous edge is to avoid confronting the origin of the horrors portrayed in the pictures. The dark surround troubles the viewer because it appears to be nothing. It resists signification. It is the ‘weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant’.111 It is the showing of death, in some sense similar to the black border of Victorian letters of condolence. This darkness, however, contains no expression of sympathy: it marks ‘the utmost of abjection’.112 Especially in the second photograph the corpses that lie upon the ground have too much shape. We are used to seeing piles of corpses. We are accustomed to such sights and contour them with the violence of familiarity: ‘It is a pile of dead people’. It is possible to grow used to these images of mass murder: ‘The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wears off after one sees a few more’.113 The corpses are contaminated by a certain kind of context, that of habituation. Atrocity photographs initially wound the eye, they cause pain but then – with repeated viewing – the wound becomes cauterized. The darkness, however, is plaintive. It does not shock the spectator. It is registered instead as emptiness. It is felt as a kind of loss in the field of vision. These pictures can be given the appearance of coherence. This is precisely what Didi-Huberman does, and what also occurs here. They can be named, shaped, made into some thing. They can be filled. Yet a part of the darkness will always resist this desire to contour it. It remains rather that out of which contour arises, bordering all interpretations yet resisting being delimited by them. Shape momentarily disappears in this darkness. The disappeared There is honesty in the insubstantiality of the expanse of blackness, in its refusal to be representative. The corpses that are bordered by this blackness, whilst manifestly present as representation, form the unrepresentable. Preserved by the photograph, they are given too much substance. Bodies which were reduced to ash (which were rendered shapeless) continue to appear in the photograph as something rather than the nothing they became. Soon after the pictures were taken, the bodies that continue to lie upon the ground in the photographs were dragged to the pit and then burned. This flesh has vanished yet stubbornly remains. To remove the nothingness that borders

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these figures is to perpetuate the travesty of this kind of representation, the travesty of the illusion of shape where now there is none. John Paul Ricco has written that in ‘the time of AIDS, a disappeared aesthetics may be the only way to ethically relate to the historicity and sociality of AIDS; to avoid sparing loss as has occurred in the history of symbolizing, narrativizing, and putting a face to AIDS’.114 We might similarly reflect on the necessity of a ‘disappeared aesthetics’ in relation to Auschwitz. The only way to adequately represent loss is to lose representation: ‘the problem is not simply the question of representational content, but the question of representation itself ’.115 Images too often recuperate what they depict. They keep that which has disappeared in the realm of appearance. There is always something where there should be no thing. The darkness in these photographs approaches the non-state of being no thing. A disappeared aesthetics is one in which it is not the visible or invisible that matters but the imperceptible. It is ‘a refusal of either/or logics, a non-dialectical double refusal that is “nolonger-being” and “not-yet-being,” at once’.116 It is the falling of difference back into sameness, the return of sounds to the noise. It is not disappearance as we usually conceive of it (the making absent of a presence) but the reappearance of the beneath of appearances. Ricco explains that ‘a disappeared aesthetics disappears aesthetics, making it difficult to determine artifactuality, authorial presence, even form and content, those things that constitute aesthetic and art historical discourse’.117 In the case of these photographs the presence of the photographer (Alex, whose full name we will now never know for certain, he was perhaps Alberto Errera, and of whom all that is left are these four pictures) and the content of the images are, of course, vital. So too, however, is the disappeared aesthetics which surrounds rather than supersedes them. This blackness is the nothing that is loss. The shapeless frame of these images must never be sacrificed, but the shape is equally important. These images were acts of resistance taken by inmates at Auschwitz. They represent the unrepresentable. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. On the other hand, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their special horror – namely the sight of human skeletons – was not at all typical of for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvation.118

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Sontag reiterates Arendt’s assertion about these pictures from the camps, writing that ‘what makes the images unbearable – the piles of corpses, the skeletal survivors – was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness), and immediately cremated them’.119 These photographs demonstrate that not all pictures of the camps are disingenuous. On the day in August when the Greek Jew Alex took these images, the gas chamber was operational. These prints preserve a horrible narrative. Taken from the point where life ended, they display the after-death, they show the bodies that are soon to become or have already become ash. The first blurred picture shows two members of the Sonderkommando pulling a corpse towards the burning pit, whilst another member is bending down, possibly preparing to drag a body in the same direction. In the second picture the men have disappeared. They are, perhaps, enveloped by the smoke. In the screen of smoke that rises up from the pits Didi-Huberman sees ‘the cracklings of grease, the smells, the shriveling of human flesh’. He sees sounds, smells and physical degeneration. This synaesthesic quality to the photographs makes them similar to Celan’s poetry and Delbo’s poetic prose. The visual conjures up the acoustic, the olfactory and the tactile. The smoke here forms a kind of interference. It has the quality of noise. This ash-cloud hides the pits and the dead within them. It gets in the way of witnessing. Yet perhaps ‘getting in the way’ is what is needed. The disturbances in the field of vision, the lack of clarity, enable a different kind of photographic representation of the Holocaust to emerge. In these raw, clumsy, desperate images, the horrors of mass-murder first became visible, emerged from out of the event. It is crucial to remember that these pictures were taken before the liberation of the camps and the accompanying reportage. It was only with the liberation that the atrocities acquired a representational profile, and value and iconic photographic images gradually emerged. Appropriate strategies, ways of perceiving and responding to this visual archive, were also slowly formulated.120 The four photographs by Alex, which lack the clarity of many of the pictures taken at liberation, have been at the margins of this process. This provides them with the potential to effect ‘a displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation’, a breaking free from the spectator’s anticipated abjection of images of atrocity, of a kind comparable to that envisaged by Jacques Rancière.121 Rancière formulates his idea of displacement, a displacement which enables a different politics of the sensible to emerge, as part of an exploration of the intolerable in images that includes a discussion of the Sonderkommando photographs although these do not form his chosen example. Alex’s pictures, however, which are more ‘cautious’ than

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a number of those taken at the time of liberation, by which I mean less obviously dramatic, would appear to provide a comparable potential to cultivate ‘a more discreet affect of indeterminate effect, curiosity, the desire to see closer up’.122 The photographs do not instantaneously abject the viewer but, instead, through their lack of immediate intelligibility, they invite attentiveness. The smoke in the images is similar to their black frames in that it is not easily shaped. Insubstantial yet given substance by the paper upon which it is preserved, the smoke is fixed yet unfixable. The clouds of cinders prevent the photographs from becoming still. Hartman describes atrocity photographs as ‘brutal, mechanically frozen images’ that enact a shameless assault upon the spectator .123 The smoke in these pictures, however, moves. It tells a story. It tells us that the bodies in front of the conflagration are destined to have a ‘grave in the clouds’.124 The smoke is in motion, a motion made measurable by the motionless corpses (this especially in the second photograph).125 The smoke makes the photograph dynamic. It achieves this dynamism through its verging on the imperceptible and through the uncertainty this effect engenders in those who look at it. Ash Ash is the body made almost undetectable. It is the horror of the body unshaped: the horror of the murder not just of the individual but of their unique contour. The ash is the beyond of the Muselmann. If the ultimate aim of biopower was to sever all connection between the human and the inhuman then it had set itself an impossible aim. The idea of a broken connection requires the acknowledgment of connection in the first place. Any break will always carry a trace of connectivity. The human is the necessary condition of the inhuman and cannot be separated from it. Ash, however, is beyond the human and the inhuman: it is beyond bios or zoē. The ultimate aim of National Socialism (as opposed to biopower) was not to divide the human and the inhuman but to do away with division, to destroy. Raul Hilberg’s monumental study of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, is so named because destruction is precisely what the Nazi’s set out to achieve.126 The Muselmänner were ash in the making. Ash was the consummation of the Nazi project. The leading sense of the word ‘destroy’ is ‘to undo, break up, reduce into a useless form, consume, or dissolve’.127 Ash is the body undone, the body unbodied. It is the dissolution of shape. We all have unique contours, we are all distinct, and this ‘difference is absolute because each human being is different from all those who have lived, who live, and who will live’.128 Even the dead have their differences as

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archaeology and forensic science routinely reveal. Ash, however, is indifferent. It is beyond alterity. The individual exists in relation to the other: in their difference from them. We shape each other. As Adriana Caverero explains, we exist through our exposure to others: ‘the who is simply exposed; or better, finds herself always already exposed to another, and consists in this reciprocal exposition’.129 The self and other engage in a mutual shaping, a mutual developing. The other does not even have to be alive for us to be exposed to their otherness, for us to be shaped by them. The other does however have to be recognizable, have to be shapeable. Ash approaches the unrecognizable, approaches nothingness. It must be prevented from attaining nihility. The ash must be attested to. These photographs taken by the Sonderkommando accomplish such a bearing witness. It is important that the photographs were taken by them. These are not photographs intended to celebrate destruction. These are photographs that attempt to prevent it. That we know who took these pictures, the context of their taking, is of vital importance. The photograph of nothing Once he had left the ‘security’ of the gas chamber, Alex walked towards the rows of birch trees. It is here that he came across the women who were being led or about to be led to the crematorium. It is now that he takes ‘two exposures, hurriedly, without looking, perhaps whilst still walking’.130 The first image is fuzzy and at an odd angle but a group of women can be seen in the bottom right hand corner.131 The second, ‘is practically abstract: there is just a suspicion of the tops of the silver birches’.132 The sun is in the photographer’s eyes: ‘the image is eclipsed by the sun which bursts through the foliage’.133 This photograph is difficult to describe. It is not anything. Dan Stone refers to ‘its nothingness’.134 The ‘suspicion’ of treetops that Didi-Huberman perceives is seeable, especially when this picture is looked at in relation to the previous image (without this first picture to act as a guide it would be less easy for Didi-Huberman to make the observations he does). The picture is reproduced infrequently. It is a picture of nothing. What does it bear witness to? In Images malgré tout, Didi-Huberman suggests that the photograph attests to a great deal: When we say of the final photograph that it is simply ‘without use’ – historically, of course – we forget everything that the photograph attests to phenomenologically: the impossibility of aiming, the risk that was taken, the urgency, maybe the walk, the awkwardness, the dazzling by the sun in front, perhaps the breathlessness. Formally, this picture

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is out of breath: pure enunciation, pure gesture, pure photographic act without aim (without direction, without top or bottom), it allows us access to the conditions of urgency within which these four fragments were snatched from the hell of Auschwitz. Because this urgency also forms a part of history.135 The photograph does not show these things, a person breathing heavily, blinded by the sun, afraid yet overcome with the urgency of the task in hand. It is Didi-Huberman who brings this context to the image. The photograph is exposed by his words, he develops it. He does not, however, look at the photograph itself beyond saying that he perceives the hint of treetops. The image is predominantly black. The top left of the picture contains most of the light. Towards the middle left there is a thin ‘thorn’ of blackness jutting out into the whiteness. Towards the centre of the upper half of the image there is the most detail, what must be boughs and branches are visible. DidiHuberman uses few words to give an account of this image because it resists wording. It refuses shape. Barthes describes the experience of looking at some photographs in terms of a wounding, he writes: A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely these wounds are so many points.136 The Latin word Barthes is referring to is punctum. In Camera Lucida Barthes differentiates between the studium, that which is of general interest in a photograph, and the punctum which is a second element (not always present) that punctuates the studium. The punctum fills the spectator with sensation. Barthes’s punctum should be understood as a site of resistance. He suggests that we do not seek out the punctum, we do not understand it, rather it seeks us out; it understands us.137 The punctum is not part of the meanings that we give to an image, rather it gives us meaning. Through the injury it causes, we feel something and we must ask why have we felt and what have we felt. As punctuation it has an asemantic element to it, an aspect … a point that resists the formation of meaning which constitutes the process of reading.138 It eludes, evades, escapes our efforts to ensnare it and catch it in meaning. It gives sense without being sensible. It is a hole, a pin prick, in the image. For Dan Stone, in his eloquent analysis of the photographs, what is striking about them is that the ‘dichotomy of studium and punctum cannot be

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maintained’ because ‘the studium is the punctum’.139 This is certainly the case for three of the images although the final photograph taken by Alex would seem to have no punctum, no detail that wounds the eye. In some images, however, the punctum is ‘a kind of subtle beyond’.140 The punctum is not in the image but the image points towards it. For Barthes, this kind of punctum occurs around the erotic image as distinct from the pornographic. The erotic photograph has a blind field, it does not reveal everything. The pornographic photograph, on the other hand, does not need to be sought. It is all there. The horrific photograph might also be thought to have a blind field. The picture that attests to Auschwitz must do so as much by what it fails to show as by what it does. In this final photograph the spectator is directed towards the punctum by the grey zone of shapeless non-representation that occupies the image. Gerhard Richter writes of grey that: It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make “nothing” visible. To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it.141 Grey, for Richter, is the impossible colour. It is boundless, horrible. The final Sonderkommando photograph gestures towards such a dissolution of boundaries. It shows the dissolution of shape. It shows the spectator the horror of a world without boundaries. As discussed earlier, Kristeva distinguishes between shown and signified death.142 Signified death is death seen through the protective veil of law, of medicine, of religion, of sense. Shown death, however, death witnessed without the mediation of such discourses, ‘is the utmost of abjection’.143 It entails confronting the fragility of the self, of the borders that guarantee our identity. In the face of such death the self must turn away to protect itself, must abject the troubling vision. It seems that this black image shows us death, its horror. We become proximate to it. Death infects life, if only for an instant. This is extraordinary. Images of the dead are usually coded to operate in particular contexts. These contexts – scientific, sociological, artistic, political – mediate our encounter with such pictures. They signify the death for us. In this image, however, the protective shield of cultural coding that encircles pictures of death, the theoretical scenarios that enable its explanation, that foreshadow its reception, its abjection, is breached. We are brought back to the matter of dying. In his essay ‘Commitment’, Adorno discusses the danger that works of art which strive to depict unthinkable atrocity will

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transfigure it by ascribing some meaning to it.144 The placing in context of an image provides this kind of dangerous meaning, this making of sense where there should only be non-sense. Context is transfiguration. Horror, if it is to be felt, should not be contextualized, it should not signify. It should, instead, show itself. In this image horror is shown in this way. The abject is embodied yet in such a way that it is rendered tolerable. The image, in the disquiet and unease it arouses because it carries abjection to the viewer, thereby rendering them intimate with it, is vitally important. In its capacity to embody the horror, which makes it reminiscent of the works of Celan and Delbo, it provides a crucial means of access to the abject experience of the camps, the power of their horror. The photograph, when viewed alongside the other three taken by Alex is, however, ultimately closer to Delbo’s writing than to Celan’s in that, as part of a series, it contributes to presenting the spectator with language’s semiotic and symbolic aspects. The four images taken together form a visual correlative to Delbo’s poetic prose, permitting a glimpse of the horror yet refusing to collapse into it. Through these afterimages of Auschwitz something of the abject experience of the camps is therefore graphically pulled to the fore, fleetingly communicated, and attested to.

NOTES

Series Editor’s Preface 1 2 3

Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Mieke Bal, The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1994); Mieke Bal, The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Bal, The Practice of Cultural Analysis, p. 1. Preface

1 2 3 4 5

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Julia Kristeva and Charles Penwarden, ‘Of Word and Flesh’, in Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris (eds), Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century (London: Tate, 1995), p. 26. Laura Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive [1998], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003). Introduction

1 2 3

Edmond Jabès, The Book of Resemblances 3 [1980], trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), p. 55. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur L’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). From hereafter this text will be referred to as Powers.

152 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Auschwitz and Afterimages See, for example, James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Carol Ockman, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Claire Valier, ‘Punishment, Border Crossings and the Powers of Horror’, Theoretical Criminology 6/3 (2002), pp. 319–37; Tina Chanter, ‘The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration’, parallax 10/1 (January–March 2004), pp. 30–39; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993); Niall Richardson, ‘The Queer Activity of Extreme Male Bodybuilding: Gender Dissidence, Auto-eroticism and Hysteria’, Social Semiotics 14/1 (April 2004), pp. 49–65; and Susan E. Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). Julia Kristeva and Charles Penwarden, ‘Of Word and Flesh’, in Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris (eds), Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century (London: Tate, 1995), p. 22. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). This text will hereafter be referred to as Revolution. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 208. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 25. John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 114. Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 320. Unless otherwise indicated all translations provided in this book are my own. Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, p. 212. Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, p. 219. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 23. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 17. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 208. Adrian Rifkin, ‘Julia Kristeva and her histories’, parallax 4/3 (July–September 1998), p. 136. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 11. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 104. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 101. Hyam Maccoby, Ritual and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 118–19. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 107. Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, p. 118. Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, p. 119. Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, p. 112. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 114. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 116. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 119. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 17–18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 208.

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33 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 155. 34 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. 35 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. From hereafter this text will be referred to as Remnants. Execrable Speech 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 155. Julia Kristeva, ‘On Céline, Music and the “Blunder”’, in Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press 1996), p. 231. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love [1983], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 41. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 42. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 43. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, L’École des cadavres (Paris: Denöel, 1938), p. 108. Céline, L’École des cadavres, p. 62. Nicholas Hewitt, The Life of Céline (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 213. Hewitt, The Life of Céline, fn.71. p. 318. Hewitt, The Life of Céline, p. 215. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, p. 43. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, p. 49. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, p. 55. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, p. 58. Céline, L’École des cadavres, p. 213. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? [1948], trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 6. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 10. The homosexual was also labelled a collaborator (e.g. scapegoat) in the United States during the McCarthy era although this time their bedfellow was communism. See Axel Madsen, The Sewing Circle (London: Robson, 1998), p. 193. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?,’ p. 58. Drieu La Rochelle was a well known writer in France in the inter-war years. During the occupation he was director of the Nouvelle Revue Française. Drieu La Rochelle committed suicide in 1945. Sartre also mentions his collaboration in What is Literature? pp. 46–7 and pp. 145–46. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’, p. 58. This quotation from Brasillach is taken from Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s The Collaborator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 41. This does not seem to mirror the kind of enticing femininity Sartre describes. It is not the content of Brasillach’s writing that interests Sartre as much as the sexuality of the author. For a discussion of ‘horizontal collaboration’ in this context, see Megan Koreman, The Expectation of Justice (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 108–14.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

Auschwitz and Afterimages Koreman offers a symbolic reading of horizontal collaboration as a form of perceived ‘conquest’ by the Germans on p. 112. Kaplan, The Collaborator, p. 164. Jean Améry, Preface to the Future [1961], trans. Palmer Hilty (London: Constable, 1964), p. 18. Given the passage of anti-Semitic legislation by the Vichy regime at the time, retirement in this context should be understood as a euphemism for having one’s position revoked. See Ingrid Glaster, ‘Sartre à Condorcet’, in Sartre, Vichy et les intellectuels (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), pp. 95–121. By coincidence the Lycée Condorcet is where Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s father, Fernand Destouches, studied for a time. See Frédéric Vitoux, La vie de Céline (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1988), p. 22. See Glaster, ‘Les Mouches sous l’Occupation’, in Sartre, Vichy et les intellectuels, pp. 11–24. Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries [1983], trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1999), p. 149. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 149. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ [1905], reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 7, (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 151–52. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 149. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 150. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 150. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 150. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 151. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 151. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 151. Sartre goes on to say that breaking into a hole is not solely a violation but also a fulfilment. To plug a hole is to make good a lack, to achieve a feeling of plenitude, a sense of wholeness. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 152. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 6. By filling the hole Sartre is, of course, asserting his masculinity. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 149. Sartre, War Diaries, p. 151. Thomas C. Spear ‘Virility and the Jewish “Invasion” in Céline’s Pamphlets’, in Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear (eds), Céline and the Politics of Difference (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1995), p. 99. Céline, L’École des Cadavres, p. 17. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night [1932], trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Calder, 1997), p. 206. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on Credit [1936], trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Calder, 1989), p. 214. Céline, Death on Credit, p. 215. There are several other examples of Céline’s fixation in the book, amongst them there is a maid whom Bardamu confesses to liking, described as having ‘an ass so muscular it was almost square’, p. 490; and another woman portrayed as having done hard labour that ‘had given her biceps that were no joke … they looked like hams’, p. 494. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Bagatelles pour un masscare (Paris: Denöel, 1937), p. 362.

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50 Leslie Heywood, Bodymakers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), pp. 11–12. 51 Heywood, Bodymakers, p. 11. 52 Céline, Death on Credit, p. 490. 53 For a fuller discussion of the cultural coding of the hard and the soft see my essay ‘Sexing the Canvas’, in Dana Arnold (ed), Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 8–33. 54 See Sigmund Freud’s ‘Fetishism’ [1927], reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 147-57. 55 Nathalie Gassel, Musculatures (Asnières: Le Cercle, 2001), p. 92. 56 Gassel, Musculatures, p. 55. 57 Gassel, Musculatures, p. 46. 58 Céline, Death on Credit, p. 158. 59 For a discussion on design as outline see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 139–41. 60 Heywood, Bodymakers, p. 16. 61 This means Céline’s fascination with the hard body cannot be characterized as the sexual practice known as muscle worship which usually involves a strong tactile element. For a discussion of this phenomenon see Niall Richardson, ‘Flexrated! Female bodybuilding: feminist resistance or erotic spectacle?’ Journal of Gender Studies 17/4 (2008), pp. 289–301. 62 Rosemarie Scullion provides an insightful reading of Céline’s love of ballerinas in her essay ‘Choreographing Sexual Difference: Ballet and Gender in Céline’, in Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear (eds), Céline and the Politics of Difference, pp. 140–68. 63 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, in Douglas Crimp (ed), AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), p. 222. For Bersani the sodomist and the traitor cannot be intimate as they are ‘excluded from all triumphant communities’, and are therefore ‘reduced, or elevated, to a kind of objectless or generalized ejaculation, a fucking of the world rather than each other’. See Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 166. 64 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 212. Jane Gallop, on the other hand, reads anal intercourse as an act during which sexual difference is denied. See Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 67. 65 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 162. 66 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 162. 67 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 167. 68 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 172. 69 Sartre, War Diaries, p. 151. 70 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 167. 71 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1950), p. 234. 72 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 249. 73 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 168. 74 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 183.

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75 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate [1946], trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 41. These comments provoked Céline’s fury when they were published in 1946, not because the novelist was labelled as an anti-Semite but because he was accused of having been paid to write the pamphlets. 76 The critic Paul Vandromme writes that the Jew is not just everywhere and nowhere in Céline, the Jew is also something and nothing: ‘Céline uses the word Jew without knowing exactly what it means. He commits so many mistakes in regard to it that it comes to signify nothing at all.’ Vandromme, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1963), p. 77. 77 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 115. 78 Spear, ‘Virility and the Jewish “Invasion” in the Pamphlets’, p. 110. 79 Spear, ‘Virility and the Jewish “Invasion” in the Pamphlets’, p. 109. 80 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ [1909], reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 10, (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 1–147; and Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ [1910], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 11, (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 57–137. 81 For a short discussion of Sex and Character see Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 108–110. 82 Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, p. 36. 83 Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, p. 36. 84 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 182. 85 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 66. 86 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 191. 87 Sartre, War Diaries, p. 149. 88 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 71. 89 Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 421. 90 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 10. 91 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 146. 92 Roland Barthes, Leçons (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 17. 93 Barthes, Leçons, p. 17. 94 Barthes, Leçons, pp. 16–17. 95 Barthes, Leçons, pp. 13–14. 96 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 164. 97 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 63. 98 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 43. 99 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 63. 100 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 58. 101 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), p. 64. 102 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10. 103 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 151. 104 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 150.

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105 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 189. 106 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 189. 107 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 190. 108 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, pp. 191–92. 109 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 186. 110 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, pp. 202–03. 111 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 189. 112 Sartre, War Diaries, p. 150. 113 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955–56 [1981], trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 202. 114 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003), p. 46. 115 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 46. 116 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 14. 117 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. 118 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 475. 119 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 477. 120 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 477. 121 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 155. 122 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 477. 123 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 478. 124 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 478. 125 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 478. 126 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 87. 127 Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt [1996], trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 171. The epigraph is spoken by the character Yudenzwek in Act 3 of L’Église. See Louis-Ferdinand Céline, L’Église (Paris: Denöel et Steele, 1933), p. 150. For Roland Barthes the influence of Céline upon Sartre’s writing extends far beyond the use of a single epigraph. He writes of Céline: ‘Many writers are influenced by him. Sartre to start with. Sartre’s writing, or if you prefer his vision as he expresses it in words, stirs you a little like the way Céline’s does.’ Roland Barthes, ‘Réponse à une question sur Céline’, in Œuvres complètes 5: 1977-1980 (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 1024. 128 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, p. 171. 129 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, p. 171. 130 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, p. 172. 131 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 132 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 133 Kristeva, ‘On Céline: Music and the “Blunder”’, p. 232. 134 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 133. 135 Julia Kristeva, Au risque de la pensée (La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 2001), p. 67. 136 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 17. 137 Emmanuel Lévinas, On Escape [1935], trans. Bettina Brego (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 64. 138 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 4. 139 Lacan, Écrits, p. 4.

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140 Lacan’s description of the child’s entry into a state of anticipation also suggests the beginning of a sense of futurity for the infant. The mirror stage does not solely bring the child outside of itself but also outside of the present. There is no looking back for the infant once looking forwards and backwards become possibilities, once the reflection has supplemented the child’s rhythmic temporality with a linear one. 141 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. 142 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. 143 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. 144 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 17. 145 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 18. 146 Kristeva, ‘On Céline: Music and the “Blunder”’, p. 231. 147 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization [1961], trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 274. 148 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 102. 149 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 15. 150 Kristeva, ‘On Céline: Music and the “Blunder”’, p. 230. 151 Julia Kristeva, ‘Avant-Garde Practice’, in Interviews, p. 215. 152 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Rigadoon [1969], trans. Ralph Manheim (Normal: Dalkey, 1997). 153 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical [1993], trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 112. 154 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 135. 155 Julia Kristeva, ‘From One Identity to Another’, in Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 142. 156 Julia Kristeva, ‘From One Identity to Another’, p. 142. 157 Julia Kristeva, ‘From One Identity to Another’, p. 145. 158 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Julia Kristeva – Take Two’, in Kelly Oliver (ed), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 51. 159 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 260. 160 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 339. 161 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 339. Arendt goes on to state that in earlier manifestations of the mass movement such men did help its doctrines to be taken seriously. 162 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Facism’, in Under the Sign of Staturn (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 90. 163 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Apart from Sex’, Journal of Visual Culture 8/3 (2009), pp. 265–77. 164 What Céline means by the term Jew in the pamphlets is complicated by the fact that the figure of the Jew becomes almost all encompassing. Africans, aristocrats, freemasons, Soviets and surrealists are each enjuivés or ‘jewified’ at some point. It is this quality which Alica Yaeger Kaplan suggests has rendered these texts by Céline impervious to a ‘thematic political analysis’. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 108. 165 Oliver, Reading Kristeva, p. 102. 166 Jennifer Stone, ‘The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diane Loxley (eds), The Politics of Theory (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), p. 47.

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167 Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, p. 108. 168 Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, p. 109. 169 Stone shares Kaplan’s concern with the lack of attention Kristeva pays to the historical circumstances within which the pamphlets were produced, writing that ‘Céline’s political pamphlets, when read in a 1980s context, may seem to be divorced from the social conditions which led to their emergence and which made their racist programme possible. But if one considers the historical place of production of these anti-semitic writings, one cannot miss the signs to the factories of genocide’. Stone, ‘The Horrors of Power’, p. 46. Kristeva, however, would understand both fascism and modernist literature to be symptoms of the identity crisis precipitated by our era having put ‘rationality into question’. See Kristeva, ‘On Céline: Music and the “Blunder”’, p. 230. The pamphlets are therefore indubitably of their time. 170 Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, p. 126. 171 Stone is not alone in her belief in textual contamination. The ability of certain writings to pollute their readers is given credence by, for example, some Romany. Writing can literally be abject. This is briefly considered in Calum Carmichael’s essay ‘Gypsy Law and Jewish Law’, in Walter O. Weyrauch (ed), Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 125. 172 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Aesthetics: The Essential Works Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion, (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 208. 173 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 69. 174 Alice Yaeger Kaplan, ‘Sources and Quotations in Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre’, in Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear (eds), Céline and the Politics of Difference, p. 37. 175 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 146. 176 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 146. 177 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 18. 178 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 161. 179 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 223–42. 180 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 227. 181 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 16. 182 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 241. 183 Philippe Alméras, Je suis le bouc (Paris: Denöel, 2000), pp. 7–8. 184 Philippe Alméras, ‘Céline’s Masquerade’, in Céline and the Politics of Difference, p. 76. 185 Hewitt, The Life of Céline, p. 171. 186 Henri Godard, Céline scandale (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 96. 187 Steven Conner, The Book of Skin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 164. 188 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 27. 189 The particular copy used here is held in the Special Collections section of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. 190 Céline, Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 332. 191 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Les Beaux draps (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, 1941), p. 60.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

See Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953 (New York: D.A.P, 2001), p. 14; and Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928–1958 (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 114. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon [1766], trans. Robert Philmore (London: Macmillan, 1874), p. 36. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 22. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2 [1851], trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 642. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2, p. 643. Michel Serres, Genesis [1982], trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 22. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 94. Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993). Here it is not being suggested that Francis Bacon is trying to communicate his own pain through the paint. This noise beneath the subject is not of the subject. Paint cannot vehicle an artist’s feelings although the critic Clement Greenberg would seem to suggest it can in his essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ from 1940. See Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 23–37. For a good summation of the argument against such a notion of paint as vehicle see Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion, 1994), particularly pp. 200–14; and Fred Orton, ‘(Painting) Out of Time’, parallax 1/3 (September 1996), pp. 99–112. This whorl is often figured in Bacon’s paintings, in the form of smeared faces and smudged bodies. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 29. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits [1966], trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta, 1999), p. 33. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 33. Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon ou la brutalité du fait (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 77. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 35. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 36. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 52. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 48. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 49. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music [1977], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 26. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 [1976], trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 95. William Haver, ‘Really Bad Infinities: Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life’, parallax 5/4 (October–December 1999), p. 16. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 [1986], trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 59. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 53.

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26 For a more detailed consideration of the reception of Bacon’s works see my article ‘Upon the Scents of Paint: Bacon and Synaesthesia’, Visual Culture in Britain 10/3 (2009), pp. 253–70. 27 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 59. 28 Deleuze wrote that ‘all of the body escapes through the mouth that screams’. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 33. 29 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929], trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 22. 30 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 54. 31 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 159. 32 Attali, Noise, p. 33. 33 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego [1985], trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 163. 34 Lacan discusses ‘extimacy’ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 139. 35 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 1. 36 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 37 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 141. 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 141. 39 Roudiez’s excellent translation of Powers of Horror does fail to make the differentiation between the objet petit a and the abject as clear as is possible. Roudiez translates the key passage on p. 1 of Powers concerning the distinction between the two as ‘Nor is it (the abject) an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire.’ The original French text reads ‘Il n’est pas … cet ob-jeu petit fuyant indéfiniment dans la quête systématique du désir’. It might possibly be translated as ‘It is not … this play-thing petit a ceaselessly fleeing in the unconditional quest of desire’. See Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur L’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 9. 40 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11. 41 For a description of the idea of the acoustic mirror see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 80–81; and Anzieu, The Skin Ego, pp. 168–71. 42 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World [1965], trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 325. 43 Within three weeks of a child’s birth differentiation begins to occur in its screaming. See Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 163. 44 Reinaldo Arenas wrote ‘I scream, therefore I exist.’ The scream is indeed intimately connected to being. The scream is the child’s first oral assertion of its existence, and can sometimes be a man’s last. Arenas, Before Night Falls (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001), p. 301. 45 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2, p. 643. 46 This ‘possibility of seeing’ is similar to the ‘possibility of Saying’ that Avital Ronell discusses in her essay ‘Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test’. In the Zen practice of koan, the posing of a problem by a master for a pupil, the ‘largely internal contest … is intended to secure an experience of extreme dispossession.’ Thought is encouraged to out-think itself, to open to a thinking beyond thinking. This opening is often attained ‘by the administration of a shock’. ‘The shock is crucial to the experience of the koan: it stages the opening of thought exceed-

162

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Auschwitz and Afterimages ing itself in the jolt.’ See Avital Ronell, ‘Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test’, parallax 10/1 (January–March 2004), p. 62. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 134. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 12. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 14. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 141. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 141. Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens, ‘“Seeing the Story of One’s Time”: Appropriations from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain 10/3 (November 2009), p. 347. Hammer and Stephens, ‘“Seeing the Story of One’s Time”’, p. 347. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 208. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 155. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 54. Kristeva differentiates between showing and signifying in Powers. That which is shown is unmediated. It should therefore be understood as similar to the kind of pure presence Deleuze describes. See Powers of Horror, p. 3. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 2-3. Background Noise

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Primo Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, in Other People’s Trades [1985], trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 161. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 362. Diamanda Galás, ‘Diamanda Galás’, in Andrea Juno and V. Vale (eds), Angry Women (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1991), p. 10. An idea of the extremely careful planning that goes into each performance is provided by the reproduction of Galás’s notes for her performance of ‘Wild Women with Steaknives’ in The Shit of God (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1996), pp. 6–9. Galás, The Shit of God, p. 10. Galás, The Shit of God, p. 10. For a fuller explanation of EQ (equalisation) see Francis Rumsey and Tim McCormick, Sound and Recording: An Introduction (Oxford: Focal Press, 2002), p. 135. Galás, The Shit of God, p. 10. For a brief discussion of the theatrical effects Galás prefers to use in her performance see The Shit of God, pp. 2–3. Examples of this technique are provided by the tracks ‘Confessional (Give me Sodomy or give me Death)’ from the album Plague Mass (Mute Records, 1991) and ‘O.P.M.’ from SchreiX (Mute Records). Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (London: Blackwell, 1986), p. 191. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 4. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Michael Flanagan, sleeve-notes to Plague Mass.

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14 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 110. 15 Lotte Lehmann, More than Singing: The Interpretation of Songs (Westport: Dover, 1975), p. 10. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature: Volume 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 88. 17 Anne Karpf, The Human Voice (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 222. 18 At times sound is heard but not listened to. Adrian Rifkin, in a discussion of the sonic landscape of Paris, writes that ‘to hear, at the point it becomes to listen, is to constitute random combinations of noise or music as meaning’. To hear is to attend to the means of delivery of a meaning not to the meaning itself. Hearing occurs on the cusp of the shaping of sound into sense. Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 88. 19 Karpf, The Human Voice, pp. 220–23. 20 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 155. 21 Karpf, The Human Voice, p. 223. 22 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Julia Kristeva – Take Two’ in Kelly Oliver (ed), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 51. 23 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 47. 24 Primo Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 25 Primo Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 26 Primo Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 27 Hayden White, ‘Figural Realism in Witness Literature’, parallax 10/1 (January–March 2004), p. 115. 28 White, ‘Figural Realism in Witness Literature’, p. 115. 29 Robert Antelme, The Human Race [1957], trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro: Marlboro Press, 1992), p. 114. 30 Julia Kristeva, ‘On Céline: Music and the “Blunder”’, in Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 231. 31 For a discussion of the role played by the physical body in Celan’s late work see Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 79–117. 32 ‘Nah, im Aortenbogen’, in Paul Celan, Threadsuns [1968], trans. Pierre Joris (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2005), p. 214–15. 33 ‘Alle die Schlafgestalten’, in Paul Celan, Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 344–45. 34 Celan, ‘Die Posaunenstelle’, in Selected Poems, p. 350. 35 John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen, ‘Synaesthesia: An Introduction’, in Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison (eds), Synaesthesia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 3. 36 John Felstiner, Paul Celan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 86. 37 Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry [1981], trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 146. 38 Richard E. Cytowic, ‘Synaesthesia: phenomenology and neuropsychology’, in Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison (eds), Synaesthesia, p. 38.

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39 For a brief history of these sculptures see Anthony Hughes, Michelangelo (London: Phaidon, 1997), pp. 161–162. 40 Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 41 Galás, The Shit of God, p. 14. 42 For a possible photographic example of such an embodiment see my article ‘The Skin of the Photograph: Representing the Murdered Women of Juárez’ West Coast Line 53 43/1 (Spring 2007), pp. 26–31. 43 Philippe Sollers, Les passions de Francis Bacon (Paris: Gallimard 1996), p. 136. 44 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience [1986], trans. Andrea Tarnowski (California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 19. 45 Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, p. 18. 46 Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, p. 20. 47 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 48 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. 49 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 50 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 51 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [1964], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 66. 52 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 223. 53 For a discussion of these facets of Celan’s poems see Tobias’s The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan. 54 Celan, Selected Poems, p. 351. 55 Felstiner recommends translating ‘Leertext’ as ‘text-void’. See Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 271. ‘Empty-text’ is another possibility. 56 Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 57 Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing’, p. 161. 58 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullor-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1999), p. 322. 59 Tobias, The Discourses of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan, pp. 112–113. 60 Tobias, The Discourses of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan, p. 320. 61 Levi, ‘On Obscure Writing,’ p. 161. 62 Celan, Selected Poems, p. 63. 63 Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), p. 111. 64 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 33. 65 As John Mowitt states, ‘hearing is omnidirectional and automatically receptive’. Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 47. 66 Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, trans. David Osmond-Smith (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), p. 33. 67 David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965), p.31. 68 Celan was, of course, not at Auschwitz. 69 It was made in 1958 for the publishing firm Günther Neske. See the sleevenotes to Paul Celan, Ich hörte sagen: Gedichte und Prosa (der hörverlag, 2 cassettes). 70 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 32. The line Celan misspeaks is ‘Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen andern singet und spielt.’ ‘He calls out jab deeper in the earth you lot you other sing now and play.’ He says instead ‘… ihr andern spielt weiter

notes

71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

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zum Tanz auf’. ‘… you others play on for the dance.’ This is actually the end of a later line. See Celan, Selected Poems, pp. 62–63. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema [1982], trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 18. Chion, The Voice of Cinema, p. 27. Hanna Segal, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 86. Hanna Segal, The Work of Hanna Segal (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 63. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours [1810], trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1970), §754, p. 302. Language cannot be owned however. It can resist as much as aid an oppressor. In her report of his trial, Hannah Arendt wrote of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s ‘heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him’. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 48. Celan, Selected Poems, p. 63. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature [1975], trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 26. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 26. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 26. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 51. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 44. Celan is engaged in a commentary on Büchner’s Lenz at this point. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 47. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 48. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken, 1996), p. 30. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p. 30. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p. 30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 23. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 53. Celan, Selected Prose, p. 49. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11. Celan, Selected Poems, p. 323. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 47. Michel Serres, Genesis [1982], trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). p. 62. Serres, Genesis, p. 139. William Haver, The Body of this Death (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 86. Amidst the Nightmare

1 2

Ber Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz [1977], trans. Sharon Neemani (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985). This has been published in French as Au cœur de l’enfer, trans. Batia Baum (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2001).

166 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Auschwitz and Afterimages The importance of the Langfus text was not recognized by its finder, Gustaw Borowczyk. It was therefore kept in an attic in Poland until 1970 when his brother donated it to the archive at Auschwitz. The other Gradowski text was taken to Israel by Haïm Wollnermann in 1947. It was first published through a vanity press by Wollnermann in 1977. Zoë Waxman, Writing the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 5. Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 165. Jadwiga Bezwińska (ed), Amidst a Nightmare of Crime (Kraców: State Museum of Auschwitz Press, 1973), p. 184. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [1986], trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), p. 34. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 34. Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 111. Greif, We Wept Without Tears, p. 136. Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers [2007], trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), p. 103. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 37. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 37. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 34. Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers, p. 74. Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers, p. 101. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 41. See also Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz [1995], trans. Harry Zohn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 196. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 42. Greif, We Wept Without Tears, p. 70. Greif, We Wept Without Tears, p. 70. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 27. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 29. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 37. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003), p. 119. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: “Here there is no why”’, in Stuart Liebman (ed), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 211. LaCapra, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah, p. 211. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 125. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 123. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 63. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 63. David Hon, ‘Critical Evaluation of Mass Deacidification Processes for Book Preservation’, in S. Haig Zeronian and Howard L. Needles (eds), Historic Textile and Paper Materials II: Conservation and Characterization (Washington: American Chemical Society, 1989), p. 15.

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33 D.J. Priset, ‘Permanence and Alkaline-Neutral Papermaking’, in S. Haig Zeronian and Howard L. Needles (eds), Historic Textile and Paper Materials II: Conservation and Characterization (Washington: American Chemical Society, 1989), p. 2. 34 Bezwińska, Amidst a Nightmare of Crime, p. 76. 35 Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve [1981], trans. Ruth Feldman (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 30. 36 For a description of arrival at Auschwitz see Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey (New York: Berghahn, 2009), pp. 185–193. 37 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 82. For a detailed discussion of Laub’s ideas about witnessing see my article ‘Testimony on Trial: Reviewing Rape in The Accused’ Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture 40/3 (2008), pp. 68–83. 38 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 82. 39 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 82. 40 Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eye-witness Account [1951], trans. Tibere Kremer and Richard Seaver (London: Granada, 1973), p. 60. 41 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 38. 42 Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 107. 43 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 81. 44 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 84. 45 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 239. 46 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 240. 47 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 181. 48 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 190. 49 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 239. 50 The literary qualities of the Scrolls are recognised by Susan L. Pentlin in her chapter ‘Testimony from the Ashes: Final Words from Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando’, in Dennis B. Klein, Richard Libowitz, Maria Sachs Littell, and Sharon B. Steeley (eds), The Genocidal Mind (St.Paul: Paragon, 2005), p. 259. 51 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 205. 52 Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 205. Under the Skin 1 2 3 4 5 6

Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits [1966], trans. Sidney Rosenfield and Stella P. Rosenfield, (London: Granta, 1999), p. 28. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [1986], trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), p. 95. Leon Greenman, An Englishman in Auschwitz (Edgware: Valentine Mitchell, 2001), p. 44. Steven Conner, The Book of Skin (Ithaca: Cornell Universily Press, 2004), p. 74. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), p. 26. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 72.

168 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Auschwitz and Afterimages Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 30. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 80. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 49. Although Kristeva does at times seem to do precisely this, for example in Stabat Mater. See Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love [1983], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 234–63. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 68. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 68. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 68. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 25. See W.R. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, in Second Thoughts (London: Karnac, 1984), pp. 110–19. Bion’s ideas are discussed by Didier Anzieu in The Skin Ego [1985], trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 37–38. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, p. 111. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, p. 111. Bion, ‘A Theory of Thinking’, p. 112. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 153. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 153. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 98. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 105. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40. Water as liquid would, for example, be such a paper. The story of the Persian king Xerxes seeking to punish the Hellespont, for destroying a bridge he had recently constructed, by having it tattooed, rests upon this knowledge for its effect. For a brief summation of Herodotus’s account of this event see pp. 6–7 of C.P. Jones’s ‘Stigma and Tattoo’, in Jane Caplan (ed), Written on the Body (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 1–16. Anzieu lists several paradoxes, amongst them that the skin is ‘both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful and misleading’. See The Skin Ego, p. 17. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 102. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 2–3. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 3–4. Even the use of laser treatment to remove tattoos is often only partially successful. The tattoo sometimes remains beneath the surface of the now superficially clean skin. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 63. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 17–18. Barbara Bell, Just Take Your Frock Off (Brighton: Ourstory, 1999), p. 161. For a discussion of this within the context of Morrison’s Beloved see Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virgina Press, 2002), pp. 182–183. Elie Wiesel, Night [1958], trans. Stella Rodway (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 54. Agi Rubin and Henry Greenspan, Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2006), p. 171.

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38 Charlotte Delbo was a French political prisoner. She was arrested in France in March 1942 and sent to Auschwitz in January 1943. In January 1944 she was transferred to Ravensbrück. 39 Charlotte Delbo, Convoy to Auschwitz [1965], trans. Carol Cosman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. 6. 40 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory [1985], trans. Rosette Lamont (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 1 (translation emended). 41 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays [1970], trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), pp. 85–126. 42 John Mowitt, Percussion (Durham, 2002), p. 48. 43 Mowitt, Percussion, p. 45. 44 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 163. 45 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 2–3. 46 Iris Marion Young’s research exemplifies this point, in an essay she describes how women athletes suffer from an arrested potential as a result of their education. In a footnote she details the results of a survey of textbooks for young children which ‘revealed that children are thirteen times more likely to see a vigorously active man than a vigorously active woman and three times more likely to see a relatively active man than a relatively active woman’. See ‘Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality’, in Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 158. 47 Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 58. 48 Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, p. 58. 49 Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, p. 59. 50 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 229. 51 For a close analysis of Delbo’s style of writing see Nicole Thatcher, A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). 52 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 229. 53 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 24. 54 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror [1993], trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 25. 55 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 199. 56 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 199. 57 Alan M. Klein, Little Big Men (Albany: SUNY, 1993), p. 255. 58 James M. Glass, ‘Skin Ego and Purification Ritual: Psychodynamics behind the Nazi Final Solution’, in Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2/1 (Spring 1997), pp. 50–51. 59 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz [1979], trans. Susanne Flatauer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), p. 45. 60 Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt [1996], trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 53. 61 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 101. 62 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 101.

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63 Wiesel, Night, p. 126. 64 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 65 See André Green, The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse [1973], trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 234–38. 66 Translation emended, in particular ‘cri’ is here translated as ‘scream’ rather than retaining Lamont’s choice of ‘cry’. Given that Delbo describes herself to be in agony, screaming seems a more suitable alternative. Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 3. 67 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 68 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema [1982], trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 79. 69 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10. 70 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 71 Robert Antelme, The Human Race [1957], trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro: Marlboro Press, 1992), p. 114. 72 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 73 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 57. 74 Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 67. 75 Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 67. 76 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Touchstone, 1984) p. 34. 77 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1965). 78 Mary Jacobus, ‘Jane Austen in the Ghetto’, Women: a Cultural Review 14/1 (2003), p. 77. 79 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, pp. 70–71. 80 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 35. 81 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 32. 82 The genotext consists of the drive elements in a text and can display itself through repetition. ‘Designating the genotext in a text requires pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm), in the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of denotation, narrative, etc.)’. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 86. 83 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 74. 84 Those moments when the drives are most in evidence (those passages with include an extensive use of repetition, for example) in Delbo’s writing might be understood as a kind of linguistic muscularity designed to compensate for a disturbance in the skin-function. It is an aggressive prose forming ‘a muscular type of self-containment – “second skin” in place of a proper skin container’. See Esther Bick, ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object-Relations’, in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968), p. 485. Writing can give the writer a contour. Delbo stitches the semiotic into the skin of language as part of a reappropriation of the symbolic. She reshapes herself through her prose. 85 Julia Kristeva, ‘From One Identity to Another’, in Desire in Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 136. 86 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 87 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 142. 88 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 145.

notes 89 90 91 92 93 94

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Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 239. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 145. Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 4. Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 4. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 57 (translation emended). Joseph Hillis-Miller, ‘Paul de Man as Allergen’, in Barbara Cohen, Tom Cohen, Joseph Hillis-Miller and Andrzej Warmiński (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 194. 95 Paul de Man, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warmiński (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 89. 96 Lea Fridman Hamaoui, in a thoughtful reading of Delbo’s work, cites a specific instance where she feels repetition is used to matter that which is being described. Hamaoui focuses on a passage which repeatedly uses the word ‘brick’. ‘The word is repeated again and again as though its repetition would aid us in grasping the brick in the ultimacy of its realized and materialized form’. See Hamaoui, ‘Art and Testimony: The Representation of Historical Horror in Literary Works by Piotr Rawicz and Charlotte Delbo’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 3/2 (1991), p. 250. 97 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883–5], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 285. 98 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 112. 99 Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Paul Patton (ed), The Deleuze Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 222. 100 Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, p. 224. 101 Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, p. 224. 102 Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, p. 224. 103 Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, p. 220. 104 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 25. 105 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 28. 106 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 28–29. 107 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 46. 108 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 47. 109 Renée A. Kingcaid, ‘Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et Après: The Struggle for Signification’, French Forum 9/1 (1984), p. 105. 110 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 152. 111 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. 153. 112 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 51. 113 Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 3. 114 Delbo, Days and Memory, p. 2. 115 Jennifer L. Geddes, ‘Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust’, Hypatia 18/1 (Winter 2003), p. 110. 116 Hayden White, ‘Figural Realism in Witness Literature’, parallex 10/1 (January– March 2004), p. 114.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend [1983], trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive [1998], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), p. 164. An earlier version of the arguments I put forward in this chapter is included in my article ‘The Gap in Context: Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz’, Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006), pp. 40–68. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1995], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 7–8. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 129. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 129. Agamben lists two exceptions to this formulation: in the realm of theology and in the incarnation of the verb. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 71–115. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 155. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1 [1976], trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 139–140. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 119. Agamben does Foucault a disservice here as the outlines of such a consideration do exist in his unpublished works, particularly the lecture notes for the 1975–76 course ‘Il faut défendre la société.’ Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg draw upon this material for their own Foucauldian re-thinking of the Holocaust which was published almost contemporaneously with the Italian edition of Remnants of Auschwitz. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, ‘Michel Foucault, Auschwitz, and the Destruction of the Body’, in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds), Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 205–37. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 48. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 168; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 49; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception [2003], trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 2. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 2. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End [1996], trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 42–43. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 51. Agamben, Means without End, p. 43. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 171. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 85. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 156. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 55. Giorgio Agamben, The Open [2002], trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 12.

notes 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

173

Agamben, The Open, p. 22. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 81–82. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 55. Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness (London: Pimlico, 1995), p. 116. If, as Agamben contends, ‘biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoē and bios, human and inhuman, survival’, (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 156) then his witnessing has to be situated in a concentration camp. There is no place in his arguments about biopower for those camps like SobibÓr which operated only as extermination camps and where one was usually dead within a few hours of arriving. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 63. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben’, in Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (eds), Witnessing the Disaster (Madison: University of Winsconsin Press, 2003), p. 290. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003), p. 80. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 120–21. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 121. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 388. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 130. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 133–134. Alexander García Düttmann, ‘Never Before, Always Already: Notes on Agamben and the Category of Relation’, Angelaki 6/3 (December 2001), p. 4. In his essay ‘The Exemplary Exception’, Andrew Norris describes how Agamben’s own ascribing of paradigmatic status to the camps has something of the sovereign about it. The paradigm mirrors the structure of the exception. See Norris, ‘The Exemplary Exception’, Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003), pp. 6–16. Düttmann, ‘Never Before, Always Already’, p. 4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 60. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 163–64. Düttmann, ‘Never Before, Always Already’, p. 5. Agamben, The Open, p. 83. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 189. Agamben explicitly equates the idea of the remnant with the zone of indistinction in Le temps qui reste [1999], trans. Judith Revel (Paris: Rivages 2000), pp. 123–4. Agamben, Le temps qui reste, p. 105. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 147. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 102. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 20. Agamben, Le temps qui reste, p. 79. Agamben, Le temps qui reste, p. 87. Agamben, Le temps qui reste, p. 163. Agamben, Le temps qui reste, p. 163. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [1980], trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 14. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 12.

174 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Auschwitz and Afterimages Lyotard, The Differend, p. 151. Lyotard, The Differend, p. xi. Lyotard, The Differend, p. 13. For a fuller explanation of Lyotard’s efforts to confront Faurisson’s position see Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 144–49. See also Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany: SUNY, 2009), pp. 95–147. Lyotard, The Differend, p. 14. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Discussions, or Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 368. Lyotard, The Differend, p. 88. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 323. For a discussion of how this regression to basic sensory experiences is embodied in Delbo’s writings see my essay ‘Symbol Reformation: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After’, in Griselda Pollock and Francesco Ventrella (eds), Concentrationary Memories (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012), forthcoming. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 81. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 166. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 169. Primo Levi, If This is a Man [1947], trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 96. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 85. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 19. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 129. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. xiv. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 82. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 113. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 113. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 120. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 204. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 30. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 30. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 30. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 30. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 208. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 81. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 31. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 114. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 147. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 81. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 81. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, p. 81.

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98 J.M. Bernstein, ‘Bare Life, Bearing Witness’, parallax 10/1 (January–March 2004); Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit (New York: Palgrave, 2002); LaCapra, ‘Approaching Limit Events’. 99 Bernstein, ‘Bare Life, Bearing Witness’, p. 7. 100 J.M. Bernstein, ‘Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics “after Auschwitz”’, New German Critique 97 33/1 (Winter 2006), pp. 31–52. 101 LaCapra, ‘Approaching Limit Events’, p. 273. 102 Hartman, Scars of the Spirit, p. 90. 103 Hartman, Scars of the Spirit, p. 245, fn 20. 104 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [1986], trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), p.37. For a discussion of Agamben’s rather loose use of the testimony of Zalman Lewental (a member of the Sonderkommando) in his Preface see Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan, Giorgio Agamben: À l’épreuve d’Auschwitz (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2001), pp. 23–27. 105 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 23. 106 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 22. 107 Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004), p. 113. Struk is wrong to state that all the photographs were taken from the same place. The photographs of the women running and of the tree tops were taken later at some distance from the gas chamber. See Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 23. 108 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 51. 109 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 52. 110 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 52. 111 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 2. 112 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 113 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 20. In the later book Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag argues however that there are some photographs the impact of which does not diminish, ‘there are pictures whose power does not abate, in part because one cannot look at them often’. She suggests that there are some images of facial disfigurement, such as those of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we cannot become inured to. They will always cut the eye. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 74. 114 John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002) p. 40. For a further discussion of Ricco’s ‘disappeared aesthetics’ in relation to AIDS see my essay ‘Puncture/Punctum’, in Griselda Pollock (ed), Conceptual Odysseys (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), pp. 90–102. 115 Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, pp. 40–41. 116 Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, p. 41. 117 Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, p. 42. 118 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1950), p. 446, fn. 138. 119 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 75. In her book Memory Effects, Dora Apel also states that photographs were ‘nonexistent in the camps’. Apel, Memory Effects (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 117. 120 For a summation of the reception of photographs taken at liberation see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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121 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator [2008], trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 104. 122 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 104. 123 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘The Struggle Against the Inauthentic’, parallax 10/1 (January–March 2004), p. 77. 124 Paul Celan, Todesfugue, in Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 62–65. 125 The corpses act as a gauge against which to measure change in a similar way to the way the mouth does in Bacon’s Study after Velázquez as discussed in the second chapter. 126 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 127 C.T. Onions (ed), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 531. 128 Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives [1997], trans. Paul A. Kottmann (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 89. 129 Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 89. 130 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 23. 131 This picture has also suffered in reproduction from the violence of retouching. In one instance, ‘from the sequence taken outside, the first photograph has undergone a whole series of processes: the lower right hand corner has been enlarged; then made rectangular, in such a way as to recreate more familiar conditions from a point of view which did not benefit from this; then recentred and isolated (all the rest of the picture becoming superfluous). Worse, the bodies and the faces of the two women in the foreground have been retouched, a face invented, even the breasts put back’. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 50. 132 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 23. 133 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 23. 134 Dan Stone, ‘The Sonderkommando Photographs’, Jewish Social Studies 7/3 (Spring 2001), p. 138. 135 Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 54. 136 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida [1980], trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 26–27. 137 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 26. 138 On the subject of the asemantic aspect of punctuation see Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘Absolute Immanence’ in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 220–39. 139 Stone, ‘The Sonderkommando Photographs’, p. 138. 140 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 59. 141 Quoted in Herman Rapaport, ‘Gerhard Richter and the Death of Poignancy’, parallax 10/3 (July-September 2004), pp. 104–105. 142 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 143 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 144 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ in Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 88.

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INDEX

31661 93­–4­, 99, 101 abjection xvii–xx, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 16, 27, 30, 31, 32–3, 52, 56, 57, 63, 64–5, 67, 69, 72, 76, 80, 98–9, 103, 108, 143, 145, 149, 150 Adorno, Theodor W. xv, 59, 62–3, 64, 73, 135, 149 afterimages xxi, 150 Agamben, Giorgio xix, 10, 125–38, 140, 141, 142; Homo Sacer 125–6; Le temps qui reste 132; Remnants of Auschwitz xix, 10, 125, 132; State of Exception 125, 127; The Open 128, 131 AIDS 59, 61, 100, 144 aleph 74 Alphen, Ernst van 47 Althusser, Louis 102, 103 Améry, Jean 17, 48, 50, 93, 103, 106, 117 Anouilh, Jean 17 Antelme, Robert 65, 108, 139 anti-Semitism 24, 25, 33 Anzieu, Didier 51, 96–8 Appropriation 40 Arendt, Hannah 23, 27, 30, 36, 144, 145; The Origins of Totalitarianism 23, 144 Aristotle 126

Attali, Jacques 49, 51 Aufhebung 97 aurality 45 author-fighters 78 avant-garde 3; art xvii, 2, 9; literature 2, 4, 5, 9 Bacon, Francis xviii, 10, 45–8, 49, 50, 53, 54­–7, 59, 63, 65, 67; Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X 45, 47–8, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55; Triptych May-June 1973 47, 53 Bagatelles pour un massacre see Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Bakhtin, Mikhail 52 bare life 125-6, 127–8, 136, 139 Barthes, Roland 26, 30, 148, 149; Leçons 26 Bataille, Georges 9, 51; ‘Mouth’ 51 Bell, Barbara 100 Berio, Luciano 70 Bernstein, Jay 130, 140 Bersani, Leo 22 Bettelheim, Bruno 70 Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht 72, 96 Biopolitics 126, 136, 141 bios 125–6, 128, 130, 133, 146 Birkenau xviii, xix, 4, 77, 80, 83, 102 Blanchot, Maurice 134, 138; The Writing of the Disaster 138

190

Auschwitz and Afterimages

blood 53, 62, 65, 95, 108, 111; menstrual blood 8 body, the xix, 2, 21, 39, 46, 49, 50, 51, 56–7, 60, 62, 65, ­66, 69, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101–6, 110, 114, 117, 133, 138, 146 Brasillach, Robert 16–17 breath-turn 74–6, 110 Buchenwald 105 Butler, Judith 40–3, 94–5, 129; Bodies that Matter 41; Excitable Speech 40; Giving an Account of Oneself 129 caesura 34 Celan, Paul xviii, xix, 10, 63–4, 65–76, 90, 109, 111, 145, 150; Alle die Schlafgestalten 65; Aschenglorie 68; Atemwende 74; Lichtzwang 75; Nah, im Aortenbogen 65; The Meridien 74; Todesfuge 63, 70, 72, 73 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand xviii, 4–5, 9, 10, 11-16, 19–44, 52, 53, 55–6, 63, 65, 73–74, 79, 105, 109; Bagatelles pour un massacre 13, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42–4; Destouches, Louis-Ferdinand 13, 38; Guignol’s Band 35; L’École des cadavres 13, 15, 19; L’Église 19, 31, 34; Les Beaux draps 13, 25; Mea culpa 13; Mort à crédit 13; pamphlets 4, 5, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 35– 44; Voyage au bout de la nuit 13 Chion, Michel 71, 108 chora 94, 114 Christianity 8–9 circumcision 24–5, 28, 132–3 Clark, T J xx class identity 14 Cohen, Arthur A. 132 collaboration 5, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27–8, 79, 84; collaboration and sexuality 17

collaborationist writing 16 concentration camp xix, 64, 102, 126–8, 144 confession 48–9 Conner, Steven 93 Conrad, Joseph 27 Cornell, Drucilla 94 cultural artefacts xx, xxi Cytowic, Richard E. 66 da Vinci, Leonardo 24, 54; Mona Lisa 54 Dalí, Salvador 45 De Kooning, Willem 54–5; Woman and Bicycle 54 de Man, Paul 113 death-world 64, 90, 132, 138–9, 140 deconstruction 130, 131, 133 Delbo, Charlotte xviii, xix, 10, 72, 90, 101–2, 103, 104, 106, 107–8, 109–13, 114, 115–16, 117, 135, 145, 150; Auschwitz et après 107; Convoy to Auschwitz 101; Days and Memory 101, 107 Deleuze, Gilles 35, 46, 56–7, 73; Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation 46 Des Pres, Terrence 108 Destouches, Louis-Ferdinand see Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Didi-Huberman, Georges xix, 80, 81–2, 84, 87, 141–3, 145, 147–8; Images malgré tout xix, 80, 82, 147 differend 134, 136, 137 disappeared aesthetics 144 Dragon, Shlomo 78 Dreyfus-Le-Foyer, Henri 17 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre-Eugène 16 drives, the xviii, 2, 27, 31–2, 74, 95–6, 106, 109, 114 Düttmann, Alexander García 130 Eaglestone, Robert 135 echo 26, 59, 61, 71, 87, 106

index Edkins, Jenny 131 ellipses 29, 34–5 Emmanuel, Pierre 16 Errera, Alberto 144 Expressionism 54 fascism xviii, 10, 11, 13, 14, 30, 33, 37, 39, 40, 43, 56, 63, 65, 76, 105 Fanon, Frantz 24 Fawkes, Guy 49, 85 football match 86, 141 Foucault, Michel 33, 39, 50, 126; The History of Sexuality 50; Madness and Civilization 33 Frankl, Victor 108, 139; Man’s Search for Meaning 108 Freud, Sigmund 2, 18, 24; ‘Little Hans’ 24; On Sexuality 18 Galás, Diamanda 10, 59–62, 63, 65, 66; Defixiones, Will and Testament 59, 63, 64; Plague Mass 59, 61, 62; SchreiX 59; Vena Cava 62 Gandersheim 65, 108, 139 Gandon, Yves 22–3 gas chambers 10, 78, 84, 93, 125, 134, 135, 141–2, 145, 147 Gassel, Nathalie 21 Geddes, Jennifer L. 117 gender 15, 18, 21, 94 genocide xviii, 59, 63, 64, 78–9 genotext 2, 110 Gide, André 13 Glass, James M. 105 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 73 Gradowski, Zalmen 77, 78, 80, 83, 90–1 Gregorian chant 61 Greif, Gideon 79 Grey Zone, the 77, 79, 90 Guattari, Félix 73 Hammer, Martin 55–6 Hardwicke, Catherine 100

191 Hatoum, Mona xvii hate-speech 41, 43 hatred 12, 13, 24, 25, 26, 33, 41, 65, 117 Haver, William 50, 76 Heidegger, Martin 66 Herman, Chaim 77, 78 heteroclite 21 Heywood, Leslie 20 hibakusha 76 Hilberg, Raul 146 Hitler, Adolf 13, 63, 127 holed skin 105 holes 14, 18–19, 23, 25, 29, 31, 34, 36, 47, 67, 69, 70, 89, 98, 99, 100, 148; anus 18, 19, 22, 52, 98; mouth-hole 46 Holocaust, the xvii, xix, 1, 10, 64, 76, 81, 85, 88, 89, 132, 139, 140, 145 Holocaust denial 136 homosexuality 16–17, 19, 26 horror xviii, xix, 10, 11, 25, 27, 30, 36, 56, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 74, 76, 89, 91, 108–9, 111, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150 identity 3, 5, 14, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 74, 85, 86, 90, 101, 106, 108, 109, 115, 130, 133, 149 imaginary father 6, 12 incest 7 inhuman 128–31, 133, 137, 139, 140, 146 Jabès, Edmond 1 Jacobus, Mary 109 Jameson, Fredric 53–4 Jaws 99–100 Judaism 7, 8, 9, 25 Karpf, Anne 63 Kingcaid, Renée A. 115

192

Auschwitz and Afterimages

Kristeva, Julia xvii–xx, 1–10, 11–12, 16, 25, 26–7, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 52, 53, 57, 63, 67, 74, 80, 94–5, 98, 103, 105–6, 110, 111, 114, 115, 149; Black Sun 6; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection xvii, xviii, xix, xx, 1, 2, 5–7, 11–12, 16, 25, 32, 41, 94, 98, 103, 105, 111; Revolution in Poetic Language 2; Tales of Love 6, 12; The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt 31 LaCapra, Dominick 81, 129, 140 Lacan, Jacques 29, 32, 50, 51, 61, 94 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 67 Langer, Lawrence 136–8 Langfus, Leyb 77, 78, 80, 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 89; Der Geyresh 77 language and testimony 138 Lanzmann, Claude 80–1 Laub, Dori 85–7, 89, 139–40 Lautréamont, Comte de 3, 4, 9; Les Chants de Maldoror 3 Lehmann, Lotte 62 Leiris, Michel 48 leprosy 7–8, 105 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 45 Levi, Primo 59, 63–4, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 79, 80, 84, 86, 91, 136, 141; Moments of Reprieve 84; ‘On Obscure Writing’ 63; ‘The Grey Zone’ 79 Lévinas, Emmanuel 32 Lewental, Zalman 77, 86–7, 90 liberation 101, 145, 146 life-world 138, 140 Lodz ghetto 78 loneliness 29–31, 37 Lyotard, Jean-François 125, 134–5, 136, 137 Maccoby, Hyam 7–8; Ritual and Morality 7

Maków Mazowiecki ghetto 88 Mallarmé Stéphane 3–4; Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard 4 Mark, Ber 77; The Scrolls of Auschwitz 77–8 Marxism xvii, 2 mass movements 23, 30, 33, 36 mass murder 74, 88, 143 Massumi, Brian 103, 114; ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ 114; Parables of the Virtual 103 materiality xix, xx, xxi, 42, 44, 48, 60, 65, 80, 95, 113 maternal cults 7 McClary, Susan 62 memory 6, 51, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106–7, 116–17, 133, 137; deep memory 116; surface memory 116 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 67 Michelangelo 66 mirror-phase 6, 12, 32–3, 61, 115 Mowitt, John 102 Müller, Filip 105, 142 Munch, Edvard 46, 53–4 muscles 20–1, 69, 102–4 musculature of language 109 Muselmann 10, 104–6, 125, 128–31, 133, 135–6, 139, 140, 146 Nadjar, Marcel 78, 82–3, 88 National Socialism 10, 11, 30, 56, 63, 79, 93, 105, 126, 131, 146 Nazi ideal 105 Nazi imagery xviii, 55 Nietzsche, Friederich 113 noise 4, 36, 43, 46–7, 49, 51–3, 56, 59–60, 66, 67, 69–72, 74, 76, 95, 114, 144, 145 non-life 136 Nyiszli, Miklos 86, 141 Occupation, the 14, 15, 17 Oedipus complex 6, 12

index Oliver, Kelly 6, 33, 37 Orton, Fred xx outsider-witness 139 pain xvii, 45, 47–53, 60, 62, 85, 109, 138, 143 paganism 7 Penwarden, Charles xvii perfect body 105 phenotext 2, 110 phonē 126 photographs xix, xx, 4, 10, 80–2, 84, 87, 89, 119–22, 141–50 Pop art 54 Pollock, Griselda xx Poussin, Nicolas 46 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection see Kristeva, Julia primary inscription 95 printing press, the 43 proprioception 103 psyche xvii, 2, 55, 97, 99, 105 punctum 148–9 purity laws 7–8 purification 8, 28, 33; rites of purification 28 Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? see Sartre, Jean-Paul Rancière, Jacques 145 Ravensbrück xviii reappropriation 4, 12, 34, 41, 43, 111 religion 1–2, 5, 8, 10, 56 remnant 129, 130–3, 141 repetition 43, 97, 109, 110–11, 112–13, 117 Ricco, John Paul 144 Richter, Gerhard 149 Riefenstahl, Leni 37 robotization 23 Rose, Jacqueline 36 Rousset, David 109

193 rhythm 2, 3, 4, 26, 32, 35, 40, 61, 63, 69, 95, 110, 114, 117 Rifkin, Adrian xx, 5, 37 Rubin, Agi 101 S/he 20–1 Sackar, Josef 78 sadomasochism 56 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 9, 14–27, 29, 31, 33; Being and Nothingness 18; Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? 14, 16, 18, 20; Nausea 19, 31; War Diaries 18, 19; What is Literature? 16, 19 scar 99–100, 117 Scarry, Elaine xvii, 48–50; The Body in Pain 48 Schopenhauer, Arthur 46–7; Parerga and Paralipomena 46 scream 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 59, 65, 107, 108 Screaming Popes 45, 46, 53, 54, 55 Scrolls of Auschwitz xix–xx, 4, 10, 77, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89, 90, 139 self, the xviii, xix, 3, 29, 30, 31, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 64, 65, 67, 85–6, 90, 94, 99, 105, 107–9, 110, 139–40, 147, 149 semiotic, the xviii, xix, 2–4, 6, 27, 32, 35, 56, 63, 69, 72, 74, 94–5, 106, 107, 109, 110–11, 114–15, 117, 150 sexuality 5, 17–9 Shoah 81 Shoah, the 80, 136, 146 shown death 149 Sigmaringen 14 signified death 111, 138, 149 signification xvii, 2–3, 48, 49, 50, 51, 69, 94, 95, 111, 133, 138, 143 skin 21, 53, 60, 89, 93, 95, 97–105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117; and remembrance 101

194

Auschwitz and Afterimages

skin disease 7–8 Skin Ego, the 97–9 Sobieraj, Lacjan 135–6 Sofsky, Wolfgang 109 Sollers, Philippe 67 soma xvii, 2 Sonderkommando xviii, xix, xx, 4, 10, 77–80, 82, 84–87, 89, 90, 119–122, 141–2, 145, 147, 149, see also Special Squad Sontag, Susan 37, 145 Spears, Thomas C. 19 Special Squad 77, 78, 84, 86, 91, 141, see also Sonderkommando Stephens, Chris 55–6 Spielberg, Steven 99 starvation 70, 103, 144 Stone, Dan 147, 148 Stone, Jennifer 37 Struk, Janina 142 studium 148–9 Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X see Bacon, Francis survivor, the 10, 76, 78, 81, 107, 112, 117, 125, 134, 135, 137, 139–40, 145 symbolic, the xviii, 2–4, 6, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 56–7, 60, 63, 68, 72, 94, 106, 109, 110–11, 112, 115, 150 synaesthesia 66, 70, 111, 145 tattoo 93, 99, 100, 101, 105, 117 testimony xix, 10, 43, 64, 78, 80–4, 86, 88, 90, 125, 130, 131, 133, 135–8, 140; Holocaust testimony xvii–xix, 80, 117, 137; literary testimony xviii; photographic testimony xviii; spoken testimony 101, 132, 136; survivor testimony 81, 132, 140; video testimony 136–7

Thing, the 51, 52, 73 Third Reich, the 37, 74, 105, 127 third sex, the 21 Thirteen 100 Tobias, Rochelle 69 torture 46, 48–50, 59, 61, 74, 104 totalitarianism 3, 11, 30, 36, 127 unsayability xix, 136, 137 Venezia, Shlomo 79 Vichy France 16–17 Vološinov, V.N. 51 voyeurism 22 Waxman, Zoë 78 Weininger, Otto 24–5 White, Hayden 64, 116 Wiesel, Elie 101, 105 witnessing xx, 56, 125, 131, 134, 137, 140, 145; bearing witness xix, xix, xxi, 10, 86–7, 130, 136, 139–40; primary witnessing xix woman bodybuilder 20 woman-man 16, 20 word-mouth 69 wound 53, 98, 99, 100, 103, 117, 143, 148, 149 Wyschogrod, Edith 132, 136, 138– 139, 140; Spirit in Ashes 132, 138 Yad Vashem 77 Yaeger Kaplan, Alice 17, 37; Reproductions of Banality 37; The Collaborator 17 zoē 125–6, 128, 130, 133, 146