Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts 9781785339714

Citation preview

Concentrationary Art

Concentrationary Art Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts

Edited by

Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman “Lazarean Dreams” and “Lazarean Literature” were originally published together as Lazare parmi nous by Jean Cayrol. © Editions du Seuil, 1950. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019003769

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-970-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-971-4 ebook

In memory of Len and Lili Silverman. In memory of Lili Jampoller Couvée and all who resisted in dark times.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Introduction. Lazarus and the Modern World Max Silverman

1

PART I. LAZARUS AMONG US Jean Cayrol

29

Lazarean Dreams

33

Lazarean Literature

49

PART II. SITUATING CAYROL’S LAZAREAN

63

Chapter 1. Lazarean Writing in Post-war France Patrick ffrench

65

Chapter 2. The Perpetual Anxiety of Lazarus: The Gaze, the Tomb, and the Body in the Shroud Griselda Pollock PART III. READING WITH THE LAZAREAN Chapter 3. Concentrationary Art and the Reading of Everyday Life: (In)Human Spaces in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Max Silverman Chapter 4. Cinematic Work as Concentrationary Art in Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines (1999) Matthew John Chapter 5. After Haunting: A Conceptualization of the Lazarean Image Benjamin Hannavy Cousen

93

121

123

145 172

viii

| contents

Chapter 6. Lazarean Sound: The Autonomy of the Auditory from Hanns Eisler (Nuit et brouillard, 1955) to Susan Philipsz (Night and Fog, 2016) Griselda Pollock

191

Concluding Remarks Griselda Pollock

235

Index

251

Illustrations

Figure 2.1.  Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), The Raising of Lazarus, c. 1630, oil on panel, 37.9 × 32 in., 94.77 × 81.28 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Gift of H.F. Ahmanson and Company, in memory of Howard F. Ahmanson (M.72.67.2). © 2017 Digital Image Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence.

100

Figure 2.2.  Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), The Raising of Lazarus, 1632, etching, 14.5 × 10.2 in., 36.5 × 25.6 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-596.

101

Figure 2.3.  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt), May 1890, oil on paper, 20 × 25.8 in., 50 × 65.5 cm. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. © Van Gogh Stichtung, Amsterdam.

102

Figure 2.4.  Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Wheatfields with Crows, July 1890, oil on canvas, 20 × 39.5 in., 50.5 × 102 cm. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. © Van Gogh Stichtung, Amsterdam.

103

Figure 2.5.  Opening scene of a harvested meadow with crows, Nuit et brouilllard, 1955 (Dir. Alain Resnais, Argos Films, France, 32 mins.). DVD screen capture.

104

Figure 2.6.  ‘Are they freed? Will everyday life recognize [reconnaît in the original French voice-over] them again?’ (survivors behind barbed wire), Nuit et brouilllard, 1955 (Dir. Alain Resnais, Argos Films, France, 32 mins.). DVD screen capture.

107

Figure 3.1.  ‘The soup tureen’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

130

Figure 3.2.  ‘Reciting Baudelaire’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

132

Figure 3.3.  ‘In the kitchen’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/ Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

133

x

| illustrations

Figure 3.4. ‘Eros and Thanatos’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

139

Figure 4.1. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). English title: Human Resources. DVD screen capture.

158

Figure 4.2. Laurent Cantet, Entre les murs, 2008 (Haut et Court, France, 50 seconds). English title: The Class. DVD screen capture.

159

Figure 4.3. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 1 minute, 00 seconds. DVD screen capture.

160

Figure 4.4. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins). Still from 9 minutes, 10 seconds. DVD screen capture.

161

Figure 4.5. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 9 minutes, 17 seconds. DVD screen capture.

162

Figure 4.6. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 11 minutes, 30 seconds. DVD screen capture.

164

Figure 6.1. Poster for the exhibition Susan Philipsz: Night and Fog at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2016. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

192

Figure 6.2. Photograph of Hanns Eisler with Bertolt Brecht, March 1950. Bundesarchiv Bild 183-19204-2132, Berlin Sitzung des vorbereitenden Ausschusses der Akademie der Künste der DDR. Photographer Unknown.

195

Figure 6.3. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Study for Strings, installed at the end of the platforms of the Hauptbahnhof Kassel as her commission for dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, 2012. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

207

Figure 6.4. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Vernebelt IV (Befogged IV). Artist’s breath on glass, installed in the stairwell at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photographic print on Alu-Dibond behind glass, 50 × 33 cm. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

211

Figure 6.5. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Musical instrument plan for four storeys of Kunsthaus Bregenz. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

212

illustrations

| xi

Figure 6.6. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Installation view of the ground floor (bass clarinet). Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

213

Figure 6.7. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. War Damaged Instruments, 2015, framed C-type prints, photographed in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin, salvaged from the Alte Münze Berlin, 1945, installed on the second floor (trumpet). Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

214

Figure 6.8. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Installation view of the first floor (clarinet) with Eisler’s title pages for his handwritten score for parts 1–3 of Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1955), inkjet digital print on canvas, 185 × 145 cm. Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

215

Figure 6.9. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. The sound installation (flute) at the Hohenems Jewish Cemetery as the fifth part of the exhibition. Photo: Rudolf Sagmeister. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

216

Figure 6.10. Rebecca Horn (b. 1944), Concert for Buchenwald – Part I/ Tram Depot – Weimar/Germany, 1999. Wood ash, glass, tramlines, wagons, musical instruments, electric light. Courtesy: Rebecca Horn.

221

Acknowledgements

This book is the fourth volume of a four-year research project, Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation (2007–11) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of England. We gratefully acknowledge the Council’s financial support for this project. We also want to thank the artist Susan Philipsz for her generosity in providing images of her work.

Introduction lazarus and the modern world Max Silverman

Concentrationary Art is the fourth and final book in a series on ‘the concentrationary’. In our previous books in this series – Concentrationary Cinema, Concentrationary Memories and Concentrationary Imaginaries – Griselda Pollock and I outlined a theory that has its origins in the thinking of a number of French (and German) survivors of the vast network of concentration camps in Germany and Austria during World War II (totalling more than 10,000 camps), especially the analysis of the structural significance of the camp system that David Rousset expounded in his book L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946). (For a fuller discussion, see our introductions to the three books mentioned above.)1 In this volume, we would like to make a fuller case for the importance of ‘the concentrationary’ and, more specifically, the new theory of art based on it, as formulated by Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol, which he called ‘concentrationary art’ or ‘Lazarean art’. Cayrol formulated his concept of concentrationary art primarily in relation to literature; in this book, we will extend and develop the idea of the concentrationary, discuss Cayrol’s use of the figure of Lazarus to define this art, and highlight its links with other artistic practices, especially film and music, and contemporary cultural and social theories (such as theories of the everyday and critiques of modern forms of capitalism). We will also confirm the argument that runs through our whole series concerning the importance of Cayrol’s concentrationary aesthetic today and the need to distinguish it from broader discussions of art and the Holocaust. Largely forgotten over the years, the work of Jean Cayrol has experienced a limited revival in the French-speaking world more recently, since his death in 2005 at the age of 93.2 In 2007 some of his major works were brought together in one volume under the title Oeuvre lazaréenne, a conference on Cayrol took place in Rome in 2008, and a collection of essays appeared based on a conference on Cayrol held the following year in Bordeaux (Cayrol’s place of birth). The year 2009 also saw the appearance of probably the best work devoted to Cayrol’s Lazarean writing by Marie-Laure Basuyaux. Michel Pateau produced a biography of Cayrol in 2012 to complement the still-excellent earlier book on Cayrol’s life and work by Daniel Oster.3

2 | max silverman

Much of this recent work has reminded us of Cayrol’s extraordinary biography and his extensive influence on French cultural practice and debates in the post-war period. He was a published poet before joining the resistance in 1941, was arrested (for the second time) in May 1942 and sent to an internment camp in Fresnes (France).4 In March 1943 he was deported to the notorious Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex in Austria under the infamous Nacht und Nebel decree, designed to make political resisters to Nazism disappear into the ‘night and fog’. It is his experience at Mauthausen-Gusen that forms the basis for Cayrol’s key concept of the survivor as a ‘revenant’ from a state of death and will be at the heart of his ideas on concentrationary art. On his return to France in 1945, Cayrol published in quick succession a collection of poems entitled Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard (1946) and his first novel, Je vivrai l’amour des autres (1947), consisting of two parts, On vous parle and Les Premiers Jours. In the post-war period he stopped writing poetry (until 1969) and became a novelist, critic, essayist, filmmaker and editor. Through this prodigious output and his unfailing support of new writers and critics, he became one of the most important figures in post-war avant-garde culture and theory in France. In 1955 he wrote the narrated text for Alain Resnais’s film on the camps, Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), and also worked with Resnais on Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1962). In 1956 he established the journal Écrire at the Paris publishing house Editions du Seuil, whose principal aim was to foster young literary talent. It was the precursor to the better-known Tel Quel literary magazine that revolutionized theory in the 1960s.5 During this period, he championed figures such as Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet and Kateb Yacine (amongst many others) and was a significant influence on the development of the Nouveau Roman (though he was never considered one of its major practitioners). In the English-speaking world, Cayrol has received little scholarly attention, and even that has been limited largely to his contribution to Nuit et brouillard.6 It is no surprise, then, that the two essays that form the basis of his ideas on concentrationary art, ‘Les Rêves lazaréens’ and ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, have never been translated into English. The former was first published in the journal Les Temps Modernes in 1948, the latter, under the title ‘D’un Romanesque concentrationnaire’, in the journal Esprit in 1949. They were republished together in 1950 under the title Lazare parmi nous.7 Written soon after the end of the war, the essays are based, in part, on Cayrol’s own experience as a political prisoner in Mauthausen-Gusen, but also on his reflections on literature in the post-war world. This volume consists of the first English translations of these essays and is accompanied by six new essays that explore different aspects of Cayrol’s theory and apply it to other cultural works. Despite more recent interest in Cayrol in the French-speaking world, he is, nevertheless, still rarely mentioned in the context of the larger discussions about art and theory in the wake of the camps (and hardly ever in relation to theories of the novel).8 Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann

introduction

|3

and others have been consistently evoked in recent years and their views are widely known. We believe that Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art deserves to be considered alongside these views as a major contribution to these debates. We will suggest that Cayrol’s ideas on concentrationary art offer a different (though sometimes overlapping) perspective to more widely known theories. An understanding of these two essays allows us to reconfigure the field that now goes under the name of ‘art and the Holocaust’ by challenging that category as a discrete entity unto itself and by reconnecting it with broader theory and practice. Beyond that, Cayrol’s theory gives us a powerful way of reading the hidden forms of disfigured and transformed humanity in the world today. This volume is, therefore, both an exploration of Cayrol’s theory of concentrationary art and a series of studies of its potential as a theoretical resource for the analysis of contemporary art and culture. In this introduction, I will first describe briefly the regime that Cayrol endured at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, then trace the main principles of concentrationary art that he formulated in the post-war period, primarily in Lazare parmi nous, but also in some of his other writings. Following this, I will place the notion of ‘the concentrationary’ within the broader post-war context of French social and cultural theory and practice. Finally, I will introduce the six new essays that make up the rest of this collection.

Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp Simply naming the camp is insufficient to convey the physical and mental torture endured in this complex. Situated twenty kilometres east of Linz, Mauthausen-Gusen was initiated in March 1938 after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich and was only liberated on 5 May 1945 when 85,000 survivors were found. The death toll was calculated at a maximum of 325,000 and more recently at about 200,000. The name covers a complex of four core camps in the towns of Mauthausen (with three subcamps) and Sankt Georgen an der Gusen. These core camps were the headquarters of one of the largest slave labour camp complexes with a total of 100 subcamps: quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms manufacture and aircraft assembly plants, which were run by major industrial companies for a profit. This included the underground Steyr-Daimler-Puch company in which, we believe, Cayrol was forced to work. In Nazi classifications of the camp system, Mauthausen-Gusen was ranked at Level III, meaning that this was intended to be the toughest regime invented specifically for the most significant and determined ‘political enemies’ of the regime. The special responsibility of this camp was ‘extermination through labour’ of the intelligentsia. While the camp was not an extermination camp, it disposed of the failing inmates who were starved and overworked to death by several means. At first, small numbers were sent to a euthanasia site at Schloss Hartheim (which appears in the film Nuit et brouillard ); then prisoners’ lives were ended by lethal injection to the heart and, as the numbers rose, by gas van and, finally, by Zyklon B in a specially built gas cham-

4 | max silverman

ber. Other forms of mass or individual execution included icy water sprayed on naked prisoners in freezing weather until they froze to death or being drowned in barrels of water. Beating and hanging were also used. Progressive reduction of food rations was systematically used in conjunction with excessive work, such as forcing the emaciated prisoners to carry 50-kilogram stones up the full length of the 184-step stone staircase (known as the Stairs of Death) out of the quarry. During the period 1940–42, the average inmate weighed 40 kilograms while engaged in heavy industrial labour twelve hours a day. The average life expectancy of an inmate was six months, and by 1945 it was reduced to three. The majority of the inmates were Poles, Republican Spaniards, Soviet prisoners of war and resistance fighters from many parts of Europe. Some Jewish prisoners were sent there for slave labour (2,760 in total, until 1944 when Hungarian Jews and then prisoners from Auschwitz arrived, creating a total in 1945 of 29,500). According to the figures given by the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 197,464 prisoners passed through the camp, of whom 95,000 died and, of these, 14,000 were Jewish. Cayrol was sent to the camps at Gusen as a young man, where he was set to work on road and railway construction. Driven to contemplate suicide by the torture of hunger and hard labour, he was given some extra rations by a German Catholic priest, Johann Gruber, who had been imprisoned by the Third Reich since 1938. Gruber had access to outside support that enabled him to obtain food that he then distributed within the camp. He also had Cayrol moved to an indoor job working as an inspector in the Steyr-Daimler-Puch factory. Gruber was brutally tortured to death when his organization that smuggled information about Gusen out of the camp was discovered by the SS in 1944. The encounter with Gruber, and being brought back to ‘life’, is, biographically, one of the sources of the concept of the Lazarean, although it is important to stress how Cayrol developed the concept beyond his immediate experience. The sustained torture systematically practised in the camp, and the spectacular acts of violent cruelty, are the foundations for the imaginative world that Cayrol inhabited during incarceration and in the wake of the camp experience, despite the surface appearance of regained normality in the post-war world.

Concentrationary, or Lazarean, Art9 As Griselda Pollock and I have argued in the earlier books in this series, the transformed reality of the post-war world that Cayrol refers to in the preface to Lazare parmi nous is founded on the notion of the persistence of what Rousset called the ‘concentrationary universe’. Rousset’s definition of the concentrationary emphasizes both its novelty, in terms of a disfigurement of humanity, and its connections with the world beyond the camp. Rousset warns us of the potential reappearance of a phenomenon that is now latent in our everyday reality, because, far from belonging to another world that has no links with our own, it has grown out of the familiar soil of Western capitalism and continues to flourish in this terrain:

introduction

|5

Germany interpreted, with an originality in keeping with her history, the crisis that led her to the concentrationary universe. But the existence and the mechanism of that crisis were inherent in the economic and social foundations of capitalism and imperialism. Under a new guise, similar effects may reappear tomorrow. There remains therefore a very specific war to be waged. The lessons learned from the concentration camps provide a marvellous arsenal for that war.10 In the preface to Lazare parmi nous, Cayrol repeats both Rousset’s warning and his vision of the proximity of ‘normal’ and concentrationary life. Despite the fact that the war finished only a few years before, the events were already being forgotten and giving way to what Cayrol describes as ‘the astonishing frivolity of the modern world’ (29).11 The present, however, bears ‘the traces of an event which many have sought to relegate to the ruins of contemporary history’ (29). These traces must be identified and made visible. The decision to republish the essays under a new title is, therefore, not only to warn us to ‘watch out’ and ‘be on our guard’, ‘lest we forget’, but also to reveal ‘the concentrationary or Lazarean proliferation that has occurred in the soft humus of daily life’ (30–31). Here, then, we have two of the major principles underpinning and defining Cayrol’s idea of concentrationary art: art as a reminder and warning against forgetting, and art that can draw together the concentrationary reality and the post-war world of renewed ‘normality’ to show their interconnections. Cayrol uses different metaphors to describe this invisible reality, or hidden face, of our normal lives. The concentrationary reality has ‘grown up clandestinely’ like a ‘frozen river which flows through the very heart of our world’; it ‘has lived on in multiple repercussions, difficult as these are to trace’ (29–30). By using the figure of Lazarus (he who has experienced death and returns to the land of the living) and bringing him into contact with ‘us’ (those who know nothing of this world) in the title Lazare parmi nous, Cayrol explicitly evokes the theme of a hidden presence from elsewhere that inhabits our everyday lives in the here and now and has transformed our everyday reality. Lazarus might look like us but, beneath his ‘normal’ appearance, lies a terrible truth. Concentrationary art is therefore premised on the idea of the present as haunted by a past that has not passed, the present as hiding another reality that is present but not visible, the notion of ‘doubling’ that captures this uncanny co-presence of the normal and the strange in the post-war world, the breakdown of the separation between the concentrationary universe and the normal world (and, consequently, a redefinition of the idea of the concentrationary itself ), and the protean nature of the concentrationary universe that is present in the most unlikely of places. As Cayrol says, ‘[a]nd whose idea was it anyway to think for an instant that the Camps remain unchanging, in spite of the passage of time, the changing seasons and hopes?’ (51). The notion of ‘doubling’ is most apparent in the concentrationary dream. In one sense, dreams have become the only means of defence for the camp prisoner against the terrible reality of concentrationary life, which is itself a form of ‘unreality’. In the

6 | max silverman

dream, the prisoner finds a retreat and a form of solace and salvation: ‘a dream was like an almond that no one was to crack. Inside, immaculate and intact, hid the secret which allowed some to survive, along with a strange explanation of their salvation’ (34). Yet, in another sense, the retreat that the dream affords is founded not on the safety of a world uncontaminated by the horrors of the camp but on a sense of confusion in which the frontier between the two worlds has broken down: We attempted to exist in two universes which contradicted and deformed one another: the savage and incoherent universe of the Concentration Camp was seen in a certain light because we still had one foot in the real world thanks to the subterfuge of our memory and our dreams; and the real world to which we aspired, when in contact with concentrationary reality, took on a mysterious and confused ardour and flung us back into the extreme scenes of our reveries. (37) Cayrol talks of a ‘double version’, of the ‘waking dream’, ‘the living dead’ and ‘this double existence’: ‘Even at this stage, an impression of dual reality [‘dédoublement’] was taking shape in these prison dreams, an impression that was to become a permanent state of mind for the prisoner’ (39). Dreams are, then, not so much a separate world but rather they mingle with the prisoner’s waking life to create a strange, composite world. It is the world of the waking dream that allows the prisoner to be both present and absent at the same time, here and elsewhere, and therefore curiously absent from the very rigours that he was forced to undergo every day: ‘These iridescent night time perspectives were superimposed on his everyday existence and gave him the possibility of being “elsewhere”, to be with others without being like others’ (34). Concentrationary reality is, above all, not set apart from the world of the everyday – that is, a descent into a hell that bears no mark of the world from which the prisoner has come – but normality disfigured and ‘made strange’ so that the prisoner exists in a hinterland between different states: ‘We ended up, as a result of this internal rupture between two universes, living equally between two universes, without ever completely joining them, and this left us even more, and perhaps evermore, feeling as though we were wavering, in a state of mental vagrancy and rootlessness’ (37). The camp experience of ‘living equally between two universes’ and the ‘state of mental vagrancy’ that this produces is a lesson to be learnt for the post-war world. The task of concentrationary literature is to capture this disfigured reality of the present (‘[h]uman disfigurement has been taken to extremes and it falls to us to recognize its corpses’ [58]), this feeling of floating between universes, this sense of doubling and ‘rootlessness’. It will be ‘a concentrationary realism for every scene of our private lives’, a literature not of the camps but of today’s ‘concentrationary everyday reality’ (49). At the heart of this literature will be a new hero/antihero who will not be based on ‘traditional psychology’ but will be the fractured ‘Lazarean being . . . who lives on two distinct planes, distinct but nevertheless joined by an invisible thread, the plane of terror, and the plane of exaltation, that of exhilaration and that of detachment’

introduction

|7

(53). Solitude will be his defining trait and his fate, ‘as though a judge had condemned him to a life of the most horrifying solitude, a desolate solitude, in which any human face seems forbidden’ (54). He will be present and distant, fearful in the calmest of situations, alert but distracted, always split between different states: Overall, the Lazarean hero is never where he seems. He must make enormous efforts to think he is there and not elsewhere, for he has lived in a world located nowhere, whose borders are undefined, for they are the borders of death. He is ever suspicious of the place where he has just arrived. (61) The Lazarean character of the new literature is a haunted being but will also haunt others as he penetrates their separate space and casts a shadow over their frivolous lives: ‘This uprooted man, in the grips of the untiring indigence that haunts the world, can only live through others, and is very good at speaking for others who seek to deny their own agony’ (62). Cayrol’s vision in these essays is ambivalent: a new literature is needed to reveal the haunted nature of the human in the wake of the camps but as a means of resisting its presence and giving us back a sense of the human that has been forever tainted. The realm of objects can play a central role in opening up the camp that the world has become and allowing us to see again: The things that form part of his fragile heritage to him possess a presence and exceptional intensity and rarity that sometimes even the living do not. . . . Thus, the realm of objects will play an attentive and meticulous role in Lazarean literature. It will have its own passage of time, its own emotions, passions, and reticence, and it will sometimes function as an escape from solitude, an opening into the world of others, like “eyes” . . . The object next to a human being may prove more revealing and accessible than the being itself. (61) As Roland Barthes remarks in an early article on Cayrol, ‘Cayrolian objects are not at all personalized but nevertheless produce a particular sort of affectivity; a warmth emanates from them and they constitute a refuge in the way that a big city can comfort a frightened man’.12 In his essay in this volume, Patrick ffrench cites Barthes’s later distinction, in his essay ‘The World as Object’ (‘Le monde-objet’), between Cayrol’s ‘non-proprietorial engagement’ with objects and the ‘ownership’ of objects displayed in Dutch still-life painting.13 The post-war world is a place of objectification, illusion and the commodification (and hence dehumanization) of everyday life. However, by defamiliarizing the ‘object-ness’ of the world and rediscovering the sociality and human contact that adheres to objects, art will see through this veil of mystification to remind us of human affectivity and freedom. Cayrol adapts his surrealist background – ‘I was a surrealist at eleven years old’ (‘J’ai été surréaliste à onze ans’) – and post-war Marxism to reformulate a political poetics in the wake of the camps .14

8 | max silverman

In terms of the obvious Christian connotations of the use of the figure of Lazarus as the path to a new humanity, it is surprising that Cayrol’s own Christianity is not more prominent in the essays than it is. True, he refers to ‘thorns’ and ‘stigmata’; however, Cayrol’s Lazarus rarely invokes the biblical scene: ‘It can be noted that in this world I am attempting to describe, the face of Christ does not appear; the Lazarean only possesses the Camp’s pain, this pain that veils him in ambiguity and shrouds him in equivocation’ (59). And even when he refers explicitly to ‘a literature of mercy that saves man’ (62) at the end of the essay on Lazarean literature, it is not so much in terms of a Christian sense of mercy, more as a tool for the revelation of disaster and the apocalypse of history. There is more Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht here than Christian resurrection. Catherine Coquio observes that ‘[f ]or Cayrol, Lazarus is no longer the man whom Jesus brought back to life but the forever solitary individual who, fated to live and die twice, has been dispossessed of both his life and his death’, and describes concentrationary art as ‘more poetic than religious’ (‘plus poétique que religieuse’). Similarly, Basuyaux notes that Cayrol’s essay on Lazarean literature should be seen as a secularized version of what may have been lived on a more religious plane.15 Cayrol’s use of the Lazarus story is, then, less a Christian parable of resurrection as a depiction of the transformation of humanity and the modern world in the wake of the camps and the presence of death in life.16

A Concentrationary Style If we broaden the perspective of the ideas expressed in Lazare parmi nous, we can see more clearly how Cayrol’s concentrationary art differs from other theories of art in the wake of the camps and, especially, from what has come to be known (much later) as Holocaust art. The fact that ‘the concentrationary’ refers to a human condition – or ‘anthropological mutation’ (‘mutation anthropologique’), as Jean-Pierre Salgas describes it – rather than life in the camps, and affects us all rather than simply the prisoners of concentration camps is a clear indication that this is not a literature of survivor testimony.17 Although, in the two essays, Cayrol cites the personal experience of fellow deportees as examples of Lazarean literature, the art that he then goes on to describe is not an account of that experience and therefore does not give rise (at least directly) to the accompanying questions around trauma, testimony, truth and the ineffable. Concentrationary art is not testimony but a certain type of literature. Yet it is not even a literature of the camps. Often it has nothing explicitly to do with life in the camps. Cayrol’s own novels did not, on the whole, deal directly with his own experience of being a prisoner in Mauthausen. Basuyaux makes precisely this point and distinguishes Cayrol from other ‘concentrationary’ writers with whom he is often associated, such as Robert Antelme, David Rousset, Pierre Daix, André Schwarz-Bart or Primo Levi, for whom testimony was central:

introduction

|9

As opposed to these authors, J. Cayrol has never written ‘his’ testimony of the camps. Neither do his fictions nor his essays have a literal relation to this experience. This essential point prevents us from seeing these texts in the same way as other testimonies.18 In an earlier article, Marc Bertrand had already suggested that Cayrol defines the relationship between the camps and literature not in terms of testimonial experience but in terms of the disfiguring of humanity that took place there: The symbolic figure of Lazarus is not an abstraction, it emerges from the lived experience of the concentration camps. However, it is not an explicit testimony of the horror of the camps . . . The interest and importance of Cayrol’s work comes from the fact that, from the outset, it transposes, in the most accurate and lasting form, a particular historical event that Cayrol called THE OUTRAGE inflicted on the contemporary human condition. Lazarean art was ‘directly born out of such human convulsion, out of a catastrophe that shook the very foundations of our conscience’ (49). Moreover, what adds an extra dimension to the Lazarean narrative is neither its unique reference to the concentrationary, nor the problems of Lazarus’s reinsertion into a miraculously rediscovered life. Infused with the heightened sensitivity of the spectre, the world of the Return quickly appears as one that is disfigured by the major tics of the concentrationary universe. ‘More than ever, it reeks of the concentrationary’, wrote Jean Cayrol; ‘concentrationary influence and anxiety are growing ceaselessly, not only in their uninterrupted effects . . . but even more in the European and even worldwide psyche’ (49).19 Concentrationary art must respond to the way the present is haunted by a catastrophic past, what Peter Kuon refers to as ‘a concentrationary imprint on humanity which cannot be erased’.20 Jean-Louis Déotte also describes Cayrol’s ambition as an attempt to create an art that will register not the experience of survivors but that of a whole society: ‘It is the post-totalitarian era which is itself the survivor . . . [Cayrol] proposes that we have all entered into a new world that of the Lazarean’.21 In Cayrol’s vision, concentrationary art will therefore eschew the testimonial experience of survivors of the camps and will, instead, be a new literature that can register the event as an ‘aftershock’ or as ‘the existence of a post-war camp, a camp of the present, which includes all aspects of everyday life’.22 Cayrol’s idea of concentrationary art is, above all, a style that attempts to capture (or at least gesture to) the disfigurement of humanity (that ‘mutation anthropologique’) that took place (though not uniquely) in the concentration camps. In ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, Cayrol clearly expresses this search for a particular style that would capture the strangeness of the post-war world in the wake of the camps:

10 | max silverman

When considering the kind of life on the fringes that awaits camp prisoners, ought we not to ask ourselves whether there might also be a particular way of writing, of perceiving, of approaching things? Is there any such thing as a concentrationary style or literature, – apart from that of victims, who have nothing left to express – a literature in which all events, even the most familiar, seem incomprehensible, reprehensible, revolting, irritating and so extremely opaque, especially to the uninitiated. (51) We are dealing here, then, with a literature that evokes the camps only indirectly, obliquely and allusively through the mark that they have left on the everyday world of today. Cayrol is arguing for an analogical, allegorical or, as one early critic suggested, a ‘parabolic’ literature in response to the disaster.23 In ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, Cayrol refers to a number of artists who could be said to practise such an art, only a few of whom are deportees, and some of whom precede the historical event of the camps itself: Prévost, Stendhal, Picasso and, above all, ‘the troubled Albert Camus’, whom he calls ‘the first historian and researcher’ (52) of concentrationary art.24 What allows Cayrol to characterize the work of these diverse artists as ‘concentrationary’ (and elsewhere he makes the analogy with Kafka’s The Trial and In the Penal Colony) is not the subject matter of their art but, rather, their ability to find an appropriate form (or style) to convey the transformation of the human in the modern era. Like Lazarus who comes from one time and place to haunt another (and hence disturbs the relation between past and present, life and death), this literature exists in a timeless zone to refashion our sense of self and the real. In his 1964 postface to Cayrol’s 1959 novel Les corps étrangers, Barthes lucidly identifies the way in which the novel evokes the historical event stylistically without ever naming it explicitly, so that it inhabits everyday life in the present as a sort of existential ‘malaise’: What must be suggested, if not explicated, is how such a work – whose germ is in a specific, dated history – is nonetheless entirely a literature of today. The first reason is perhaps that the concentrationary system is not dead: there appear in the world odd concentrationary impulses – insidious, deformed, familiar – cut off from their historical model but dispersed like a kind of style; Cayrol’s novels are the very passage from the concentrationary event to the concentrationary everyday; in them we rediscover today, twenty years after the camps, a certain form of human malaise, a certain quality of atrocity, of the grotesque, of the absurd, whose shock we receive in the presence of certain events, or worse still, in the presence of certain images of our time.25 Barthes’s engagement with Cayrol dates from 1950 and, notably, he refers to Cayrol three times in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953).26 Here, the works of Cayrol, Camus, Blanchot, Queneau and others are examples of writing stripped of the historical and

introduction

| 11

institutional baggage known as ‘literature’, which he will call either ‘the zero degree of writing’ (‘le degré zéro de l’écriture’), ‘neutral writing’ (‘une écriture blanche’, ‘une écriture neutre’) or ‘transparent writing’ (‘une écriture transparente’). Yet, in this postface entitled ‘La Rature’ written eleven years later, Barthes returns to the link between a style of writing and its historical imprint, thus highlighting the constant tension in Barthes’s own theories between a neutral writing and its social meanings. In ‘La Rature’, Barthes identifies the central feature of Cayrol’s concentrationary art: a particular form of writing that registers – indirectly, even insidiously – the historical moment as a series of echoes and reverberations in the present and that can hold up to the surface of our familiar world a mirror whose reflection reveals a haunted landscape.27 In his coauthored book on cinema with Claude Durand, Cayrol describes this process as the construction of a parallel universe through which the viewer/reader can perceive the familiar world differently: The imagination could thus be defined as the perception, or apprehension, of the real through this parallel universe produced by means of the cinema, whose time of reading (the rhythm of editing) is not the instantaneous time of seeing an image but the visual time required for the doubling of this image.28 This way of reading the ‘real’ through its ‘stretched out’ and ‘doubled’ image confirms Basuyaux’s description of Cayrol’s method as a ‘secret’ way of bearing witness to the real through fiction (‘témoigner clandestinement’). Just as, according to Cayrol, the concentrationary reality ‘has grown up clandestinely’ in everyday life, so the art required to expose it must also be a secret testimony to a transformed landscape. Cayrol affirmed this indirect method in an interview in 1957: ‘I write to testify. . . . No, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. What I mean is, to testify secretly (clandestinement)’.29 What cannot be described directly has to be evoked allusively in other terms and, hence, draws together the experiential and aesthetic in a distinctive way. However, as Salgas observes, Cayrol’s Lazarean literature not only refashions the opposition between testimony and fiction but ‘all the conventional alternatives of the discourse on the camps: representation–the unrepresentable . . . before–after, etc.’.30 It is an imaginative approach that allows one thing to be spoken or seen through another while simultaneously abolishing the frontiers that would keep them apart. This can be seen clearly in Nuit et brouillard and Muriel, in which, in different ways, the overlaying of the everyday with horror is paralleled by the overlaps between the Nazi concentration camps and the (unspoken but present) Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) (see also Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour for the same process in relation to occupied France and Hiroshima). The understanding of concentrationary memory that Pollock and I have proposed in this series on the concentrationary is premised on Cayrol’s notion of a doubled or haunted present in which different times and spaces collide, a process that, elsewhere, I have defined as palimpsestic memory.31

12 | max silverman

The collapse of the distinction between fiction and the real (writing and history) is paralleled, then, by the similar collapse in the distinction between past and present and between different spaces involved in the ‘doubling’ process of concentrationary art. Barthes’s comments on the connection between writing and history as a haunting of the former by the latter highlights the analogical/allegorical mode of this art. It is a renewal of literature (of art in general) in the wake of the camps that, aware of its own inability to narrate the experience directly and conscious of the limitations of the conventional novelistic devices of character, plot, time and place, proposes a new space between opposites whose political aesthetic is an urgent project for the post-war world.32 This understanding of the allusive presence of history within the ‘style’ of Cayrol’s writing should allow us to reappraise the so-called apolitical nature of the New Novelists in France in the 1950s and 1960s (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras and others) with whom Cayrol was often associated. For, in the light of this sort of reading of the link between history and literature, far from simply constituting the new, nonpolitical avant-garde whose formal experiments in the novel were in direct opposition to a Sartreian understanding of politically committed literature,33 the New Novelists could, instead, be seen as the standard-bearers of the concentrationary style that Cayrol describes in Lazare parmi nous. This does not mean that the textuality and process of writing of these texts can simply be recuperated by a direct political reading; it might mean, however, that the features that characterize Lazarean literature as described in Lazare parmi nous – doubling, confusion of ‘separate’ worlds, time, space and self out of joint, the affective investment in objects, and so on – which are largely shared by ‘the new novel’, can be read (indirectly, obliquely, allusively, even allegorically) as the mark (‘l’empreinte’) of the concentrationary, as they can be in Cayrol’s own novels. Cayrol’s assimilation into the new avant-garde of the New Novelists at the end of the 1950s was indicative of the new critical distinction that was being forged at the time between formal poetics and politics; the shared adventure of the process of writing was at the expense of any historical referent for the new experimental work. Robbe-Grillet’s own collection of theoretical essays, Pour un nouveau roman (1963), played a large part in reinforcing this dichotomy, a binary opposition that has generally been maintained ever since.34 Even Basuyaux – whose description of Cayrol’s Lazarean literature as a ‘secret testimony’ suggests the possibility of an indirect political reading of a language that seems apolitical on the surface – reconfirms the dichotomy between poetics and politics when she observes that ‘Cayrol creates a very direct link between his work and the concentrationary universe, unlike the New Novelists’. Coquio similarly maintains that ‘the link between the Lazarean and the “New Novel” in 1958 was accompanied by the effacement of the camp experience’.35 However, in an interview in Libération in 1989 following the publication of his novel L’Acacia, Claude Simon observes that ‘if Surrealism came out of the war of 1914, what happened after the last war is linked to Auschwitz. I believe we often forget this

introduction

| 13

when we talk of the “nouveau roman”. It is no coincidence that Nathalie Sarraute wrote L’ère du soupcon and Barthes Le degré zéro de l’écriture.’36 Although Simon uses ‘Auschwitz’ in a general way here to cover all the camps, the connection he makes between the camps and the ‘nouveau roman’ (New Novel) is clear, as it is in Barthes’s observation in ‘La Rature’: All the literary techniques with which we credit today’s avant-garde, and singularly the New Novel, are to be found not only in Cayrol’s entire œuvre, but even, as a conscious programme, in Pour un romanesque lazaréen (a text which dates from 1950).37 Citing Cayrol’s influence on Barthes, Yannick Malgouzou highlights the inevitable link between literature and history, even, paradoxically, at those moments when the former is stripped back to its ‘zero degree’: ‘In short, all works are a product of Literature, such as it is expressed at a particluar historical moment. . . . In this sense, Literature is profoundly linked to History even when it challenges History through its questioning of those very forms inherited from History’.38 Simon’s reading of the relationship between fiction and the camps (indeed, between literature and history in general) is in the spirit of Cayrol’s ideas on a particular style that can register indirectly the effect of the historical event on the modern world. Concentrationary art paves the way for the sort of oblique approach developed by novelists like Romain Gary, Georges Perec or Simon himself, which implicitly references history through an allusive style. The connections established by Perec, for example, between the ‘autobiographical’ and ‘fictional’ narratives in his work W, ou le souvenir d’enfance, which he describes as a ‘fragile intersection’ between the two, owes much to the reworking of notions of testimony and fiction and politics and poetics first proposed in Cayrol’s Lazarean model of literature.39 The ‘real’ and the imagined are reshaped so that the affective, the experiential and the historical are embedded in literary forms in oblique ways, as Barthes’s essays on Cayrol clearly demonstrate. In the words of Marcelin Pleynet, the ‘concentrationary experience’ is lived by Cayrol both on an existential and poetic plane.40 By the same token, Cayrol’s concentrationary or Lazarean art provides an early blueprint for what we now call ‘spectral’ literature, in which ghosts of the past haunt the landscape of the present. This model can clearly be seen in the works of Patrick Modiano, W. G. Sebald and even Jorge Semprun, in which ‘normal’ objects, featureless landscapes and banal everyday life are transformed and rendered uncanny as they contain the traces of, and are haunted by, other layers of meaning from elsewhere, invisible but powerfully present. Cayrol’s Lazarus is the prototype of the ‘revenant’ who disturbs normality. Jutta Fortin and Jean-Bernard Vray are surely right to introduce their edited collection of essays on the ‘spectral imaginary’ in contemporary French literature through a discussion of the influence of Cayrol’s Lazarean model.41 Concentrationary style is a new form of the art of the invisible.

14 | max silverman

The Concentrationary and the Disfigurement of the Human Concentrationary art as a style that alludes to the disfigurement of the human in the modern world requires a refreshed understanding of the term ‘concentrationary’ itself. Over the last few decades (from at least the 1980s), there has been, first, a conflation of ‘the concentrationary’ with the event itself of the concentration camps of the World War II, and, second, the conflation of the concentration camps with the Holocaust. In our previous discussions of the concentrationary in this series of books, Pollock and I have attempted to rescue the notion of the concentrationary from both these conflations: not only does the concentrationary haunt modern times in a way that refuses temporal specificity but it also refers to an experiment on humanity carried out (in its most egregious form) in the concentration camps, not the extermination camps, which were the major (though by no means the only) sites of the attempted genocide of the Jews. For Cayrol, the figure of Lazarus captures the disfigured humanity of the modern era, and is therefore not the Jewish victim of the Holocaust, nor even the concentration camp deportee, but what the returning deportee carries with him as a message to us all in ‘normal’ life. As Malgouzou observes, ‘(It is) not a question of bearing witness to the event but rather the world in the wake of the event’.42 Lazarus is the ancient mariner of our times, the ghost of the past who interrogates the present. In his book on writing and the camps, Alain Parrau is one of the few to make the distinction between a concentrationary literature and Holocaust writing, based on the differences between the concentration and extermination camps. However, for Parrau, concentrationary literature includes ‘all testimonies in written and narrative form by survivors of the Nazi and Soviet camps’.43 This does not correspond to Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art, which, as we have seen, is not simply writing by camp survivors, nor about camps themselves. Clearly, even Parrau’s sensitive distinction between concentrationary literature and Holocaust writing fails to identify what is central to Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art. The ‘concentrationary’ is not only a style that alludes to a historical event but a present form that contains the traces of the rupture announced by the camps, the signs in which that history must be read. Do we, then, need a new category of ‘concentrationary’ writers (of artists in general), which would include the novelists mentioned above and others, to distinguish their approach from that of Holocaust writers? The subtle disfigurement of the everyday that is central to this approach (as I argue in my chapter in this volume) suggests that the concentrationary has a resonance far beyond the space of the camps themselves and the shattered lives of returning deportees; it defines a profound transformation in modern life. In our introductions to Concentrationary Memories and Concentrationary Imaginaries, Pollock and I quoted Jacques Lacan’s use of the term ‘concentrationnaire’ (in his famous 1949 article on ‘The Mirror Phase’) to refer not to the camps as such but to the way in which social relations have been subsumed within, and consequently disfigured by, a utilitarian

introduction

| 15

ethos. Lacan’s use of the term was not unique but exemplary of the broad way in which the word was used in this period to link the experience of the camps to the more general objectification of human relations under the hegemonic forms of capitalism (as we have already seen in Rousset’s writings). In the same year as Lacan’s article, the philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort defined extreme forms of bureaucratization in concentrationary terms in the first issue of the journal Socialisme ou barbarie. According to Christophe Premat, ‘this bureaucratization of society is a truly concentrationary phenomenon in the sense that the system of exploitation instituted produces a pseudo-rational logic of development and controls the different spheres of individuals’ social existence. This bureaucratization prohibits any possibility of a renewal of social norms.’44 This sort of approach – and that of the Frankfurt School in which the camps are related to modernity rather than a throwback to pre-Enlightenment society – becomes an important model for Hannah Arendt’s analysis of systematic dehumanization and the totalitarian state in her book Origins of Totalitarianism. In Tristes topiques (1955), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes numerous references to the concentrationary universe and likens the task of the ethnologist to that of a Lazarus-like figure who is permanently displaced after his travels to other lands. In the 1960s, urban sociology, social anthropology and cultural theory of the city – for example, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, films by Jean-Luc Godard (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle) and so on – critiqued the dehumanized forms of modern living in a rationalized, consumer society in terms of a concentrationary model of space. In 1975 the philosopher Claude Boudet wrote a book called (tellingly) La société concentrationnaire: analyse de la société de consommation.45 In reference to Cayrol’s book on the transformed post-war city, De l’espace humain (1968) (which I discuss further in my chapter in this book), Basuyaux highlights how Cayrol’s use of a concentrationary logic to define new city life is symptomatic of this general critical understanding of the new social reality of everyday life in the 1960s: Cayrol employs the concentrationary universe as a way of perceiving the ‘concentrationary’ nature of society. This approach allows a broader reading of the phenomena which shape the concentrationary. The camp is raised to the level of an interpretive paradigm, an analytical tool for social anthropology. . . . The camp is therefore no longer confined within the field of the analysis of totalitarian societies but functions as a prism of analysis of phenomena which are, more broadly speaking, political, sociological, economic and also linguistic.46 Coquio also refers to the political meaning of the neologism ‘concentrationnat’ and shows how Cayrol ‘extended the phenomenon to techniques of roundup and containment used during the Algerian War of Independence, and even to the depersonalization and corralling together of citizens in the big housing estates in the suburbs

16 | max silverman

which destroy the necessary “space” required for the independence and self-respect of the individual.’47 This broad use of the terms ‘concentrationnaire’ and ‘concentrationnat’ to refer to the rationalization, bureaucratization and objectification of human relations in modern capitalism will be explored further in Mathew John’s essay and my own in this collection. Suffice it to say here that many French cultural critics, sociologists, anthropologists, writers and filmmakers in the first few decades after the war were working with this more general understanding of ‘le concentrationnat’ in modern capitalist society – and one to which the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben returns in his theorization of the camp ‘not as a historical fact and anomaly belonging to the past . . . but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’.48 Hence, Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art expressed in Lazare parmi nous emerges from, and is, in turn, an influence on, this broader meaning of the term. The migration of the term across the fields of identity, social relations, the new urbanism and reconfigured humanity in the post-war world can, then, be related to the understanding of concentrationary art as a style rather than a specific content. In both cases, the surface of the everyday (to which Cayrol refers in Nuit et brouillard as its ‘décor’)49 hides an invisible reality that must be read through its phenomenal form, in the same way that Lazarus’s human appearance dissembles where he has come from and the split (and dehumanized) being that he has become.50 The concentrationary is essentially composed of the two faces of horror and the everyday, one always contained in the other, ‘the inhuman in the human’ (‘l’inhumain dans l’humain’).51 Viewed in this way, the reading of the signs of popular culture (as, for example, in Barthes’s Mythologies or Debord’s analysis of the spectacle) and the neo-Marxist readings of new consumer society (Castoriadis, Baudrillard, Althusser) could be said to share a concentrationary mode of apprehension. Kristin Ross’s reading of the hidden history of decolonization beneath the trappings of post-war modernization in France could be extended to reveal the presence of the concentrationary too.52 In Concentrationary Imaginaries, Pollock and I attempted to map out the hidden presence of a concentrationary imaginary in contemporary popular culture. Cayrol’s concept of concentrationary art provides us with the tools for a symptomatic reading of this kind so that the attack on the human qua human can be identified in the most unlikely of places. Our discussion of concentrationary art in this book is, thus, premised on clarifying the specificity of ‘the concentrationary’/’Lazarean’, distinguishing it from a generalized understanding of the Holocaust and tracing its genealogy, forms and uses in the post-war period. There are at least two good reasons for this focus: first, it highlights the particular contribution made by Cayrol’s Lazarean model to theories of art in the wake of the camps; second, it specifies the ‘anthropological’ shift that the model seeks to address, that is, a disfigurement of the human that is not simply con-

introduction

| 17

fined to the camps themselves (or to any one time and place) but haunts the modern world as an invisible presence in everyday life.

Essays on Concentrationary Art As the fourth and final work in our series on Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation, this book comprises the first English translation of Jean Cayrol’s writing on concentrationary art, Lazarus Among Us (Lazare parmi nous), a detailed analysis of the theory of concentrationary art, and an application of it to aspects of contemporary culture. We have divided the contents into three parts to cover these aims: Part I consists of Cayrol’s two essays that make up Lazarus Among Us, Part II consists of two chapters on the Lazarean, and Part III consists of four chapters that use a Lazarean approach to analyse aspects of contemporary culture (film, music and the visual arts). In Chapter 1, Patrick ffrench traces the path of Lazarean literature in France from the late 1940s to the 1960s (although, as he points out, the ‘paradoxical temporality’ of Cayrol’s model actually extends back before the camps, too). Although Cayrol uses the words ‘concentrationary’ and ‘Lazarean’ more or less interchangeably, ffrench outlines the different genealogies of these terms in the immediate post-war period and concentrates on the path of the Lazarean. He shows how Cayrol’s use of the Lazarus story, following Maurice Blanchot and others, itself changes from a Christian tale of resurrection to the far more general and ambivalent idea of the presence of death in life and the need for an art that can register this condition. Following a detailed analysis of Cayrol’s description of the Lazarean in Lazare parmi nous, and with Roland Barthes’s articles on Cayrol as his guide, ffrench highlights the tension between the Lazarean as a zero degree of writing, whose form (unencumbered by the trappings of the institution of literature) relates to an existential or phenomenological state, and its indirect connection to an historical event (the camps). He highlights Barthes’s focus on Cayrol’s treatment of objects, which, though sharing many of the characteristics of other contemporary writers like Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge, is nevertheless always propelled by an attempt to rediscover the human from which we have become alienated, a ‘transcendent humanism’ that is, however, never attained but always in process. This is not a return to the human before the camps but a refigured human born in the shadow of the exile, displacement and alienation unleashed on the modern world by the camps, which requires a new form of expression to convey it, ‘existence expressed at the level of form’ (hence, Barthes’s frequent comparisons of Cayrol’s Lazarean model and Camus’s ‘écriture blanche’ in L’étranger). In Chapter 2, Griselda Pollock approaches the figure of Lazarus and the concept of a Lazarean aesthetic from the perspectives of literature and the visual arts. She explores how a Christian Biblical figure, shown to be itself ambiguous, can be taken theoretically and aesthetically beyond its theological source to ‘figure’ a politi-

18 | max silverman

cal condition of post-concentrationary and also post-genocidal subjectivity. Drawing on Rembrandt and Van Gogh, linking the latter to Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol, Pollock sets up a dialogue between Cayrol’s Lazarean returnee and a text, Night (1954/58) by Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, in which the key elements of Lazarus – an entombed, shrouded corpse returning from ‘death to life’ – also emerges as its concluding figuration of his condition. The anxiety that might result from confusing a return from political deportation to the concentrationary condition of Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), effective disappearance and destruction through overwork and malnutrition, and the Jewish survivor (lone surviving member of his family and most of his community), is negotiated by triangulation with textual analysis of the Gospel of John and exploration of the Hebrew origins of the Greek name Lazarus, El’azar, which gives rise to the Jewish name Eliezer, as in Eliezer Wiesel. In Chapter 3, I explore the wider understanding of the concentrationary in French critical thought on everyday life in the post-war period and apply it to an analysis of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as an example of concentrationary cinema. For the major post-war theorist of the everyday, Henri Lefebvre, the concentrationary was the hidden matrix of modern life and, hence, the site on which the new disfigurement of humanity was taking place. The task was therefore to demystify everyday life in order to combat alienation. This method was taken up by a number of sociologists, anthropologists, cultural critics and others to re-evaluate the notion of habitable (or inhabitable) spaces in the modern consumer city, especially domestic space. I then go on to apply the reading of everyday life through a concentrationary lens to Akerman’s film, focusing in particular on her treatment of domestic space, objects and the body. I suggest that Akerman’s filmic style, like Cayrol’s concentrationary style, allows us to perceive these as both signs of disfigurement of the human and also, paradoxically, the conduits through which a re-humanization may emerge in terms of memory, desire and the affective life. In Chapter 4, Matthew John applies Cayrol’s notion of concentrationary art to the re-emerging theme of work and the workplace within contemporary French cinema, focusing particularly on Laurent Cantet’s film Ressources humaines (1999). John highlights the connections between Cayrol’s theoretical writing on the concentrationary and critical commentaries on abstract labour and the workplace, most notably the work of Herbert Marcuse, to read a logic of mechanized, systemic violence beyond the historical specificity of the concentration camp and within the very fabric of our everyday lives. Looking beyond the more overtly social themes in the film, John argues that it is at the level of the film text itself that the concentrationary can be read, namely at the somewhat unlikely interface between documentary and melodrama and the critical distance this creates between the spectator and the film. He suggests that the tradition of French cinéma-vérité, with its equally dynamic mix of fiction, documentary and the social, provides this way of reading the concentrationary as a

introduction

| 19

generalized presence in the post-war world, thus presenting a far deeper and more consistent threat to the human as it mutates and migrates across the landscape of modernity. The final two chapters extend the use of Cayrol’s theory of the Lazarean to the question of sound. In Chapter 5, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen develops the analysis of the concentrationary image that he first proposed in earlier work, an image that can take one or all of these three modes: the citational, the indexical and the amnesiac.53 He suggests that Cayrol’s Lazarean ‘postulate’ makes it possible to identify a fourth type of image that ‘embodies’ a different, more agitating and disturbing sense of ‘return’ than is contained in any of the earlier modes of concentrationary image. It can be both a quality of the other images and an undoing of them (and their audience). Hannavy Cousen then explores the characteristics of a ‘Lazarean image’ in relation to the work of the singer/songwriter Nick Cave, whilst suspecting that the chief identifier of the Lazarean is that its characteristics are impossible to grasp. The Lazarean return does not offer the comfort of the past like a ghost or a haunting, nor is it the banality of the zombie threat. It is something else – but something that is difficult to grasp. In Chapter 6, Griselda Pollock draws on her exploration of the Lazarean in Chapter 2 to extend its potential into contemporary art. She studies the relay between the musical score composed by East German composer Hanns Eisler for Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouilllard (1955) and its deconstructive reworking by Scottish artist Susan Philipsz in an installation in the Austrian town of Bregenz titled Night and Fog (2015) in order to pose the question of Lazarean sound. The aesthetic politics of Eisler’s continuous musical track accompanying Cayrol’s fractured poetic spoken text is analysed to identify what Thomas Trummer has defined, in post-Adornian terms, as ‘the autonomy of the auditory’. The auditory is theorized drawing on John Mowitt’s proposal of the concept of the audit as the equivalent, in sound theory, of the gaze in visual theory. Thus, the locus of the aesthetic political effect moves to the auditor whose body becomes the resonance chamber of the individuated and isolated notes Susan Philipsz choreographs across the space in her installation. Philipsz’s work also addresses the history of political persecution both in Germany and the United States of Hanns Eisler, who during his brief exile in the States wrote the classic text on film music with fellow refugee, Theodor Adorno. This chapter offers a reading of the relatively overlooked sonic, and specifically musical, dimension in what we have argued is to be understood as the classic instance of concentrationary cinema, Nuit et brouillard, by looking back at it through the prism of Philipsz’s sonic reworking. The artist’s installation, however, made good an evasion in Nuit et brouillard by linking her isolation of single instruments and their notes from Eisler’s score to a Jewish cemetery near Bregenz where the flute, used compassionately by Eisler when confronting images of the dead, punctuates the silence of a preserved cemetery for a missing community. The solitary violin, taken up in Philipsz’s installation because

20 | max silverman

it is rare in Eisler’s composition, forms a bridge to a moving passage in Elie Wiesel’s Night (1954/58) describing Eliezer, the boy, hearing a fellow prisoner on the point of death expending his failing life force on playing Beethoven’s concerto on his violin to a community of the dead and dying. The close readings of musical score, literary text and contemporary art installation conclude that we can identify as Lazarean the way that Philipsz’s work interrupts Eisler’s musical flow, which, despite its critical and political aesthetics, retains the composition – the concerted-ness – of the Beethoven concerto cited by Wiesel, despite the use of a Schoenbergian musical modernism. Philipsz’s singularity lies in both placing the sound in the body of the visitor/auditor while transmitting to that auditor the trace of a body, that of the musician coaxing single sounds out of their instruments to produce what Pollock names agitating ‘sonic revenants’. The concentrationary, as defined by David Rousset and Jean Cayrol in the immediate aftermath of World War II, has not disappeared and takes on new guises in new historical conjunctures. It is for this reason that we feel it is important to bring back into focus the two essays by Cayrol that make up Lazare parmi nous – largely overlooked, especially in the English-speaking world – as a way of detecting and challenging ‘the concentrationary universe’. For, although the concept of concentrationary or Lazarean art that Cayrol presents in Lazare parmi nous emerges from the experience of the concentration camps of World War II, it nevertheless has a resonance far beyond that event that we would do well to acknowledge if we are to renew our ideas of the polity, sociality and the human today. In this book we argue that art forms motivated (even unconsciously) from a Lazarean perspective can constitute modes of resistance to the new shapes of the concentrationary in contemporary life. Concentrationary art is not a political or ideological manifesto for our times; rather, it is a subtle and ambivalent political aesthetic that makes visible the ways we can be unknowingly stripped of our humanity and urges us to pursue the continual struggle to define what it is to be human.

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race and violence. His most recent monograph, entitled Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013), considered the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. He has recently published three coedited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of ‘the concentrationary’: Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ (Berghahn, 2011), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

introduction

| 21

Notes 1. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de Pavois, 1946); G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 2. In his biography of Cayrol, Michel Pateau admits that ‘for me, at the time, the name of Jean Cayrol evoked . . . a writer somewhat forgotten in the list of authors of the 1950s’ (‘le nom de Jean Cayrol m’évoquait alors . . . quelque écrivain un peu oublié dans une bibliothèque des années 1950’); M. Pateau, Jean Cayrol: Une vie en poésie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2012), 23. 3. See, respectively, J. Cayrol, Oeuvre lazaréenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007); P. Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures: Poétiques de Jean Cayrol (Eidôlon, 87, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009); M.L. Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement: les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009); M. Pateau, Jean Cayrol: Une vie en poésie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2012); D. Oster, Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967). 4. ‘Cayrol raconte qu’il composa son premier poème à onze ans’, C. Durand, ‘Préface’ in M. Pateau, Jean Cayrol, 10. 5. For a history of Écrire and Tel Quel, see P. Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel 1960–1982 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995). 6. See, however, D. Carroll, ‘Jean Cayrol or the fiction of the writer’, MLN 88(4) (1973) and M. Silverman, ‘Horror and the everyday in post-Holocaust France: Nuit et brouillard and concentrationary art’, French Cultural Studies 17(1) (2006) 5–18. For Cayrol’s work in film, see D. Ostrowska, ‘Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrol’s writings on film’, Studies in French Cinema 6(1) (2006) 17–28. 7. ‘‘D’un Romanesque concentrationnaire’, from Esprit 159 (1949), 340–57, re-appeared under the title ‘De la mort à la vie’ when it was published to accompany Cayrol’s script for the film Nuit et brouillard (Nuit et brouillard: Commentaire; Paris: Fayard, 1997, 47–113). ‘Les Rêves concentrationnaires’ first appeared in Les Temps Modernes 36 (1948), 520–35. 8. However, for a brief discussion of Cayrol’s contribution to theories of the novel, see J. Lévi-Valensi, ‘“Pour un romanesque lazaréen” de Jean Cayrol une théorie ontologique du roman’, in A. Pfersmann (ed.), Fondements, évolutions et persistance des théories du roman (Fleury-sur-Orne: Minard, 1998). 9. Cayrol often uses ‘art’ and ‘literature’ interchangeably, just as he does with ‘concentrationary’ and ‘Lazarean’. In this introduction, I will follow Cayrol’s practice, although, as Patrick ffrench observes in his essay in this volume, the terms ‘concentrationary’ and ‘Lazarean’ draw on a different semantic range. 10. ‘L’Allemagne a interprété avec l’originalité propre à son histoire la crise qui l’a conduite à l’univers concentrationnaire. Mais l’existence et le mécanisme de cette crise tiennent aux fondements économiques et sociaux du capitalisme et de l’impérialisme. Sous une figuration nouvelle, des effets analogues peuvent demain encore apparaître. Il s’agit, en conséquence, d’une bataille très précise à mener. Le bilan concentrationnaire est à cet égard un merveilleux arsenal de guerre.’ D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, 186‒187; The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947) 173. 11. In the introduction and in Chapter 3, page numbers of quotes from the present translation of Lazare parmi nous will appear in the text in parentheses. In all other chapters, quotes will be referenced in the notes. 12. ‘Les objets cayroliens ne sont nullement personnalisées, mais il émane pourtant d’eux une sorte d’affectivité particulière; ils portent une chaleur, ils constituent un refuge tout comme une grande ville reconforte l’homme apeuré.’ R. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1961. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 141–62, 150. 13. R. Barthes, ‘The Object-World’, in Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 4–12; ‘Le Monde objet’, in Essais Critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), 19–28. 14. Quoted in Oster, Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre, 12. (Matthew John describes Cayrol’s aesthetic as ‘the horrific extension of the surrealist project’, Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics and the Camps, un-

22 | max silverman

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

published PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2012), 20.) Oster highlights the paradox at play in the Lazarean relationship with objects (Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre, 45), which Basuyaux then defines as ‘a means of both describing the impact of the camp and effacing its effects’ (‘à la fois un moyen de dire l’impact du camp et un moyen d’en annuler les effets’ (Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 148). For a further discussion of Cayrol and objects, see M. Nadeau, Le Roman français depuis la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 39. ‘Lazare n’est plus chez lui l’homme ressuscité par Jésus, mais l’individu définitivement seul qui, voué à vivre et mourir deux fois, se sent dépossédé de sa vie et de sa mort.’ C. Coquio, La Littérature en suspens. Ecritures de la Shoah: le témoignage et les œuvres (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2015), 278 and 279 respectively; Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 139. Cayrol’s use of the figure of Lazarus is discussed in more detail in the essays by ffrench, Pollock and Cousen. J.-P. Salgas, ‘Shoah ou la disparition’ in D. Hollier (ed.), De la Littérature française (Paris: Bordas, 1993), 1005–13, 1007. Cf. Georges Bataille’s observation that, after Auschwitz, ‘the image of Man is, from that moment, inseparable from a gas chamber’ (‘l’image de l’homme est inséparable, désormais, d’une chambre à gaz’) (Critique, 12 May 1947). ‘(A) la différence de ces auteurs, J. Cayrol n’a jamais écrit « son » témoignage des camps; ni ses fictions, ni ses essais ne sont une relation littérale de cette expérience. Ce point essentiel empêche de conférer à ses textes le même statut qu’aux autres témoignages.’ Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 18. ‘A la conscience hypersensible du “revenant”, le monde du Retour est vite apparu comme défiguré par les tics majeurs de l’univers concentrationnaire. (L)a figure symbolique de Lazare n’est pas chez Jean Cayrol une abstraction elle a surgi de l’expérience vécue des camps de concentration. Cependant, il ne s’agira pas de témoignage explicite sur l’horreur des camps . . . L’intérêt et l’importance de l’oeuvre de Cayrol viennent de ce qu’elle a été, d’emblée, la transposition la plus juste, et la seule durable, d’une occurrence historique datée, de ce que Cayrol a appelé L ‘OUTRAGE infligeé à la condition humaine contemporaine. L’art lazaréen “est né directement d’une telle convulsion humaine, d ‘une catastrophe qui a ébranlé les fondements mêmes de notre conscience” (R L. p. 203). De plus, ce qui assure une portée supplémentaire au romanesque lazaréen n’est pas uniquement la référence concentrationnaire, ni les problèmes de réinsertion de Lazare dans une vie miraculeusement retrouvée. A la conscience hypersensible du “revenant”, le monde du Retour est vite apparu comme défiguré par les tics majeurs de l’univers concentrationnaire. “Ça sent plus fort que jamais le concentrationnaire. écrivait Jean Cayrol; l’influence, la solicitude concentrationnaire ne cessent de s’accroître, non seulement dans leurs réalisations ininterrompues mais encore dans le psychisme européen et même mondial” ( R.L p. 201).’ M. Bertrand, ‘Les Avatars de Lazare le romanesque de Jean Cayrol’, The French Review 51(5) (1978), 674–75. Salgas also observes that ‘the Lazarean dimension of a narrative is independent of the narration of this experience’ (‘la dimension lazaréenne d’un récit est indépendante de la narration de cette expérience’) (‘Shoah ou la disparition’, 1006). ‘une empreinte concentrationnaire de l’humanité indélébile’. P. Kuon, ‘Préface’ in P. Kuon, (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures, 10. ‘C’est l’époque post-totalitaire qui est elle-même survivante . . . [Cayrol] veut dire que nous sommes tous entrés dans un nouveau monde lazaréen’. J.-L. Déotte, ‘Le Régime nominal de l’art. Jean Cayrol: une esthétique lazaréenne’ in A. Brossat and J.-L. Déotte (eds), L’Époque de la disparition: Politique et esthétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 31. For a similar argument in relation to Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962) (the present as the site of the aftershock of a traumatic event), see G. Pollock, ‘Dreaming the face, screening the death: Reflections for Jean-Louis Schefer on La Jetee’, Journal of Visual Culture, 4(3) (2005). ‘l’existence d’un camp de l’après-guerre, camp du présent, recouvrant la vie la plus quotidienne’. Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 158. Elsewhere, Basuyaux describes Cayrol’s practice in these terms: ‘It is a question of inscribing the concentrationary experience in a text that is neither a narrative of the camps (in the sense of a literature of testimony or specifically autobiographical in character) nor a fiction explicitly related to the camps. Instead, it is a fiction that, without actually talking about the camps, bears its imprint in its form’ (‘Il s’agirait d’inscrire l’expérience concentrationnaire dans

introduction

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

| 23

un texte qui ne soit ni récit des camps (au sens de littérature de témoignage, de texte à caractère explicitement autobiographique), ni fiction explicite sur les camps. Une fiction qui, sans raconter les camps, en porterait l’empreinte dans sa forme’) (Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 29). See also a similar statement by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi on the nature of Lazarean literature: ‘The Lazarean narrative attempts to realise not the “objective” reality of the lived experience but the state of he who has survived this experience of horror and terror, of the “unliveable”, of death; of he who has “returned” to the land of the living but can only establish with this world, with time and space, with others and, finally, with himself, relations which are irregular and of the utmost singularity’ (‘Le romanesque lazaréen tente de rendre compte non de la réalité « objective » de l’expérience vécue, mais de l’état de celui qui a survécu à cette expérience de l’horreur et de la terreur, à l’ « invivable à la mort de celui qui est « revenu » parmi les hommes, mais ne peut plus entretenir avec le monde, avec le temps et l’espace, avec les autres et, finalement, avec lui-même, que des relations déréglées, d’une absolue singularité.’) (‘“Pour un romanesque lazaréen” de Jean Cayrol’, 197). For a ‘parabolic’ literature, see Claude-Edmonde Magny, ‘Le Temps de la réflexion. La parabole de Lazare ou le langage retrouvé’, Esprit, 142 (1948) 311–23. Catherine Coquio describes Cayrol’s analogical mode as follows: ‘These narratives were not testimonies. The camp could only be deciphered through signs and allusions in an atonal prose in which characters, situations, things and words only vaguely recalled a history. The memory of the camp . . . was expressed through a form of avoidance or allusive displacement’ (‘Ces récits n’étaient pas des témoignages. Le camp n’affleuraient que par signes et allusions dans une prose narrative atone qui laissait les personnages, les situations, les choses et les mots rappeler vaguement une histoire. Le souvenir du camp . . . s’exprimait par une forme d’évitement ou de déplacement allusif ’), Catherine Coquio, La Littérature en suspens, 272. (See also Yannick Malgouzou, Les Camps Nazis: Réflexion sur la réception littéraire française (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), 308, and Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 29.) In an early article on Lazare parmi nous, Roland Barthes makes a direct comparison between Cayrol’s Lazarean art and Camus’s literature of the absurd. See ‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’ in Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 1942–1961 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 105–106. ‘Ce qu’il faut suggérer, sinon expliquer, c’est comment une telle œuvre, dont le germe est dans une histoire datée, est cependant pleinement littérature d’aujourd’hui. La première raison en est peut-être que le Concentrationnat n’est pas mort il se fait dans le monde d’étranges poussées concentrationnaires, insidieuses, déformées, familières, coupées de leur modèle historique, mais diffuses à la façon d’un style les romans de Cayrol sont ce passage même de l’événement concentrationnaire au quotidien concentrationnaire en eux nous retrouvons aujourd’hui, vingt ans après les Camps, une certaine forme du malaise humain, une certaine qualité de l’atroce, du grotesque ou de l’absurde, dont nous reçevons le choc devant certains événements ou pis encore devant certaines images de notre temps.’ R. Barthes, ‘La Rature’ (postface au livre de Jean Cayrol, Les corps étrangers) in Roland Barthes, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 2, 1962–1967 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 592–600, 599; ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 189–90 (translation modified). R. Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953), 10, 30 and 32. For a fuller discussion of Barthes’s engagement with Cayrol’s work in the years 1950–64, see Malgouzou, Les Camps Nazis, 313–23. ‘L’imagination pourrait être ainsi définie comme la perception ou appréhension du réel à travers cet univers parallèle qu’on lui soummettrait au cinéma, et dont le temps de lecture (le rythme du montage) serait non plus le temps de voir une image, si rapide, mais le temps de vision nécessaire au dédoublement de cette image.’ J. Cayrol and C. Durand, Le Droit de regard (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), 24. ‘J’écris pour témoigner . . . C’est idiot de dire cela. Enfin, mettons, pour témoigner clandestinement’. Interview on 25 July 1957 in Les Nouvelles littéraires, quoted in Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 166. Cayrol is clearly influenced by the testimony of Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine in which the signs of humanity in the face of extreme violence have to be sought secretly (I discuss this further in my chapter in this volume.) However, the idea of a ‘clandestine’ literature also played a significant

24 | max silverman

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

role more generally in the French resistance when truths had to be dressed up in another language (often through poetry) to avoid the censor. Reading the surface for secret (hidden) meanings is, of course, also an essential mechanism for discovering the truth beneath the Nazis’ euphemistic language (‘stücke’, ‘figuren’ and so on). ‘toutes les alternatives habituelles du discours sur les camps représentation-irreprésentable . . . avantaprès, etc.’ Salgas, 1007. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). If Cayrol was opposed to direct testimony, he was always highly conscious of the risks of fictionalizing the camps. In an article on the relationship between literature and testimony in 1953, he criticizes the stories of the camps that domesticate and popularize the experience and turn the camp into a museum: ‘the concentration camp has become an image, a fiction, a story. . . . It has become domesticated. We are in the world of folklore’ (‘le camp de concentration est devenu une image, une fiction, une fable. . . . Il est décent. On est au folklore’). His criticism is aimed specifically at works by Erich Maria Remarque (L’Étincelle de vie) and Robert Merle (La mort est mon métier), both published in 1952, which he contrasts with those of David Rousset, Robert Antelme and Louis Martin-Chauffier, all of whom (in their different ways) avoid the ‘romanesque’ and find a mode of expression that preserves the strangeness, unreality and incommunicability of the experience of the camps. (See ‘Témoignage et littérature’, Esprit (April 1953), 575–577.) Jacques Derrida discusses the impossibility of disentangling fiction and testimony in Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998). See J.-P. Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). See however L. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Post-War France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). ‘Cayrol met son œuvre en relation étroite avec l’univers concentrationnaire, ce que ne font pas les Nouveaux romanciers’; ‘l’intégration de l’œuvre lazaréenne au Nouveau Roman acquise en 1958, s’est faite au prix de l’effacement de l’expérience du camp’. Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 112; Coquio, La Littérature en suspens. 277. See also a similar distinction made by Silke Segler-Messner between ‘une écriture blanche’ and a notion of history: ‘Even if the novels of Jean Cayrol seem to exhibit numerous characteristics of this neutral writing – the dissolution of the opposition between form and content, the anonymous characters, the wandering voice of the narrator, the absence of plot – the difference between the vision of a “transparent” language (Barthes) and the project of Lazarean writing (Cayrol) can be seen in terms of the response to history’ (‘Même si les romans de Cayrol semblent présenter de nombreuses caractéristiques de cette écriture blanche – la dissolution de l’opposition entre forme et contenu, l’anonymat des figures, la voix vagabonde du narrateur, le manque d’intrigue – la différence entre la vision d’une parole transparente (Barthes) et le projet d’un romanesque lazaréen (Cayrol) se manifeste dans l’évaluation de l’histoire’), S. Segler-Messner, ‘Pour une esthétique de l’imaginaire dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cayrol’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures 103. ‘Si le surréalisme est né de la guerre de 1914, ce qui s’est passé après la dernière est lié à Auschwtiz. Il me semble qu’on l’oublie souvent quand on parle du “nouveau roman”. Ce n’est pas pour rien que Nathalie Sarraute a écrit L’ère du soupçon; Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture’. Cited in Malgouzou, Les Camps Nazis, 368. Dominique Viart recognizes that Simon’s own writing, like Cayrol’s, is haunted by history indirectly, through allusion ‘Simon . . . never represented the concentration camp but, on more than one occasion, his work alludes to it’ (‘Simon . . . n’a jamais représenté de camp de concentration, mais son œuvre plus d’une fois, y fait allusion’), D. Viart, ‘Vers une poétique “spectrale” de l’Histoire in J. Fortin and J.-B. Vray (eds), L’Imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2012), 42. ‘Toutes les techniques littéraires dont nous créditons aujourd’hui l’avant-garde, et singulièrement le Nouveau Roman, se trouvent non seulement dans l’œuvre entière de Cayrol, mais encore, à titre de programme conscient, dans Le Romanesque lazaréen (texte qui date de 1950).’ Barthes, ‘La Rature’, 599 ‘Cayrol and Erasure’, 190.

introduction

| 25

38. ‘Toute oeuvre s’intègre in fine à la Littérature telle qu’elle est exprimée à un moment historique. . . . En ce sens, la Littérature demeure indexée à l’Histoire quand bien même elle la conteste par la remise en question de la forme héritée de cette même Histoire’. Malgouzou, Les Camps Nazis, 317. Malgouzou is right to point out the connection between concentrationary art and the ‘nouveau roman’: ‘From a purely genealogical point of view, and based on Roland Barthes’s own analysis, it seems entirely possible to see Lazarean theory as a direct influence on the Nouveau Roman’ (‘D’un point de vie purement généalogique et en se fondant sur l’analyse même de Roland Barthes, il semble possible de considérer la théorie lazaréenne comme l’ascendant direct du Nouveau Roman’) (322). 39. G. Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoel, 1975). Jean-François Louette has more recently applied Cayrol’s model to the theatre of Samuel Beckett; see J.-F. Louette, ‘Beckett, un théâtre lazaréen’, Les Temps Modernes 604 (1999). 40. Quoted in Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 168. 41. J. Fortin and J.-B. Vray, ‘Avant-propos’ in J. Fortin and J.-B. Vray (eds), L’Imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de SaintEtienne, 2012), 7–22. 42. ‘Non plus témoigner de l’événement, mais plutôt du monde à la lumière de l’événement’. Malgouzou, Les Camps Nazis, 308. See also P. Kuon: ‘The originality of Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean narratives . . . is to be found in the attention to the traumatised psyche, not only of the survivors but of post-concentrationary humans and society’ (‘L’originalité des récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol . . . réside dans l’attention portée à la psyché traumatisée, non seulement des survivants, mais de l’homme et de la société post-concentrationnaires’ in P. Kuon, L’Écriture des revenants: Lectures de témoignages de la déportation politique (Bruxelles: Éditions Kimé, 2013), 316. 43. ‘L’ensemble des témoignages écrits, dans la forme du récit, par les survivants des camps nazis et soviétiques’. A. Parrau, Écrire les camps (Paris: Editions Belin, 1995), 16. See also L. Jurgenson, L’Expérience concentrationnaire est-elle indicible? (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2003) in which the definition of concentrationary literature is, similiarly, works that attempt to express the experience of the concentrationary universe. For the distinction between the concentration and extermination camps, see also S. Lindeperg and A. Wieviorka, Univers concentrationnaire et génocide: Voir, savoir, comprendre (Paris: Arthème Fayard (Mille et une nuits), 2008. 44. ‘Cette bureaucratization de la société est un phénomène proprement concentrationnaire, dans le sens où le système d’exploitation institué produit une logique pseudo-rationnelle de développement et contrôle les différentes sphères de l’existence sociale des individus. Cette bureaucratization assèche toute possibilité de renouvellement des normes sociales.’ Christophe Premat, ‘L’Analyse du phénomène bureaucratique chez Castoriadis’, Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines (en ligne), 1 (2002); accessed online at http://traces.revues.org/4131;DOI:10.4000/traces.4131 on 2 August 2017. 45. See M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2001 [1944]); H. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967 [1951]); Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989); C. Boudet, La Société concentrationnaire: analyse de la société de consommation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975). 46. ‘L’univers concentrationnaire y est perçu comme un “concentré” de société, une modélisation qui permet une plus grande lisibilité des phénomènes qui l’habitent. Le camp se hausse alors au rang de paradigme interprétatif, de véritable outil pour l’anthropologie sociale. . . . Le camp sort ainsi du champ de l’analyse des totalitarismes, pour servir de prisme à l’analyse de phénomènes plus largement politiques, sociologiques, économiques, mais aussi linguistiques.’ Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 113. 47. ‘A étendu ce phénomène aux techniques de parcage utilisées pendant la guerre d’Algérie, et même à la dépersonnalisation et la promiscuité des grands ensembles citadins, où la promiscuité détruit “l’intervalle” nécessaire à l’intégrité des individus.’ Coquio, La Littérature en suspens, 279. See also Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 113–22. Basuyaux also draws attention to George Matoré’s L’Espace humain: L’Expression de l’espace dans la vie, la pensée et l’art contemporains (Paris: Éditions de la Colombe, 1962) and Léo Scheer’s La société sans maître: Essai sur la société de masse (Paris: Editions

26 | max silverman

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

Galilée, 1978), both of which, in their different ways, use a concentrationary model to analyse the ‘anthropological mutation’ of post-war society. Peter Kuon rightly describes the neologism ‘le concentrationnat’ as ‘what remains of Auschwitz, that is, the virus which inhabits and haunts our societies and ourselves’ (‘Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, à savoir le bacille qui depuis lors habite et hante nos societés et nous-mêmes’) in ‘La “peste” le “concentrationnaire”: poétiques de l’oblique (Cayrol, Camus, Rousset, Perec)’ in Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures, 157. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166. Nuit et brouillard: Commentaire (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 24. See also Cayrol’s comment on contemporary cinema that ‘instead of enlightening us directly only illuminates a décor’ (‘au lieu de nous éclairer directement, n’éclaire plus qu’un décor’) in J. Cayrol et C. Durand, Le Droit de Regard, 16. In his study of the ‘concentrationary experience’, the sociologist Michael Pollak uses the ‘limit’ experience of the camps to reveal basic truths about social identity, in the way that Georg Simmel, at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, used the experience of the outsider/ stranger as a way of highlighting everyday experience in the modern metropole, or, in the 1920s and 1930s, the use of ‘the immigrant’ by the Chicago School of sociologists. See M. Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire: Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale (Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000). Coquio, La Littérature en suspens, 281. See K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See B. Hannavy Cousen, ‘ISNT’T THIS WHERE . . . Projections on Pink Floyd’s Wall: Tracing the Concentrationary Image’ in Pollock and Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories, 203–22; ‘Seep and Creep; The Concentrationary Imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island’, in Pollock and Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries, 163–86; The Seeping and Creeping of Haunted Memory: The Concentrationary in Post-War Cinema (PhD, University of Leeds, 2011).

Bibliography Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Arendt, H. Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1967 [1951]. Barthes, R. ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’ in Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 1942–1961. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993; 141–62. ———. ‘The Object-World’ in Critical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 4–12; ‘Le Monde-objet’, Essais Critiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 19–28. ———. ‘La Rature’ (postface au livre de Jean Cayrol, Les corps étrangers) in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 2, 1962–1967. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 592–600; ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). ———. ‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’ in Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 1942–1961, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 105–6. Basuyaux, M.-L. Témoigner clandestinement: les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol. Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009. Bataille, G. Critique, 12 May 1947. Bauman, Z. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press, 1989. Bertrand, M. ‘Les Avatars de Lazare: le romanesque de Jean Cayrol’. The French Review 51(5) (1978), 674–82. Boudet, C. La Société concentrationnaire: analyse de la société de consommation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Carroll, D. ‘Jean Cayrol or the fiction of the writer’, MLN 88(4) (1973), 789–810. Cayrol, J. Lazare parmi nous. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950. ———. ‘Témoignage et littérature’. Esprit (April 1953), 575–77. ———. Nuit et brouillard: Commentaire. Paris: Fayard, 1997.

introduction

| 27

———. Oeuvre lazaréenne. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007. Cayrol, J. and Durand, C. Le Droit de regard. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963. Coquio, C. La Littérature en suspens. Écritures de la Shoah: le témoignage et les œuvres. Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2015. Déotte, J.-L. ‘Le Régime nominal de l’art. Jean Cayrol: une esthétique lazaréenne’, in A. Brossat and J.-L. Déotte (eds), L’Époque de la disparition: Politique et esthétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 13–37. Derrida, J. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée, 1998. Durand, C. ‘Préface’ in M. Pateau, Jean Cayrol: Une vie en poésie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2012), 9–21. Forest, P. Histoire de Tel Quel 1960–1982. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995. Fortin J. and Vray, J.-B. ‘Avant-propos’ in J. Fortin and J.-B. Vray (eds), L’Imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2012), 7–22. Hannavy Cousen, B. The Seeping and Creeping of Haunted Memory: The Concentrationary in Post-War Cinema (PhD University of Leeds, 2011) ———. ‘ISN’T THIS WHERE . . . Projections on Pink Floyd’s Wall: Tracing the Concentrationary Image’, in G, Pollock and M. Silverman (eds) Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 203–22. ———. ‘Seep and Creep; The Concentrationary Imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island ’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman, Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 163–86. Higgins, L. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Post-War France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Horkheimer M. and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 2001 [1944]. John, M. Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics and the Camps, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2012). Jurgenson, L. L’Expérience concentrationnaire est-elle indicible? Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2003. Kuon, P. L’Écriture des revenants: Lectures de témoignages de la déportation politique. Bruxelles: Éditions Kimé, 2013. ———. ‘Préface’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures, 7–13. ———. ‘La “peste” le “concentrationnaire”: poétiques de l’oblique (Cayrol, Camus, Rousset, Perec)’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures, 145–59. Kuon, P. (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures: Poétiques de Jean Cayrol. (Eidôlon, 87) Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009. Lévi-Valensi, J. ‘“Pour un romanesque lazaréen” de Jean Cayrol: une théorie ontologique du roman’ in A. Pfersmann (ed.), Fondements, évolutions et persistance des théories du roman (Fleury-sur-Orne: Minard, 1998), 195–203. Lindeperg, S. and Wieviorka, A. Univers concentrationnaire et génocide: Voir, savoir, comprendre. Paris: Arthème Fayard (Mille et une nuits), 2008. Louette, J.-F. ‘Beckett, un théâtre lazaréen’, Les Temps Modernes, 604 (1999), 93–118. Magny, C.-E. ‘Le Temps de la réflexion. La parabole de Lazare ou le langage retrouvé’. Esprit, 142 (1948), 311–323. Malgouzou, Y. Les Camps Nazis: Réflexions sur la réception littéraire française. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012. Nadeau, M. Le Roman français depuis la guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Oster, D. Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967. Ostrowska, D. ‘Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrol’s writings on film’. Studies in French Cinema 6(1) (2006), 17–28. Parrau, A. Écrire les camps. Paris: Editions Belin, 1995. Pateau, M. Jean Cayrol: Une vie en poésie. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2012. Perec, G. W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Paris: Denoel, 1975. Pollak, M. L’Expérience concentrationnaire: Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale. Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000.

28 | max silverman

Pollock, G. ‘Dreaming the face, screening the death: Reflections for Jean-Louis Schefer on La Jetée’. Journal of Visual Culture, 4(3) (2005), 287–305. Pollock, G. and Silverman, M. (eds) Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. London and New York; Berghahn Books, 2012. ———. Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. ———. Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Premat, C. ‘L’Analyse du phénomène bureaucratique chez Castoriadis’. Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines (en ligne), 1 (2002). Accessed online at http://traces.revues.org/4131;DOI:10.4000/traces.4131 on 2 August 2017. Ross, K. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Rousset, D. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions de Pavois, 1946. ———. The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Salgas, J.-P. ‘Shoah ou la disparition’ in D. Hollier (ed.), De la Littérature française (Paris: Bordas, 1993), 1005–13. Sartre, J.-P. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Segler-Messner, S. ‘Pour une esthétique de l’imaginaire dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cayrol’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Les Mots sont aussi des demeures, 99–113. Silverman, M. ‘Horror and the everyday in post-Holocaust France: Nuit et brouillard and concentrationary art’. French Cultural Studies 17(1) (2006), 5–18. Silverman, M. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. Viart, D. ‘Vers une poétique “spectrale” de l’Histoire’ in J. Fortin and J.-B. Vray (eds), L’Imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2012), 37–51.

Part I

Lazarus among Us Jean Cayrol

We thought it would be useful, without wishing to impose what we will call the ‘Lazarean postulate’ on the astonishing frivolity of the modern world, to unite in one volume two studies that have previously been published in journals at different times. They attempted to explain how, in a universe destined for failure and negation, all of man’s supernatural defences have been birthed, have grown up clandestinely, and have then lived on in multiple repercussions, difficult as these are to trace. The welcome these documents received, as much as the discomfort that some felt when faced with this new form of ‘human expression’, prompted us to open these texts up to a larger audience. They bear the traces of an event that many have sought to relegate to the ruins of contemporary history. Today, this secret evil finds fertile ground in the extreme confusion that reigns in our minds, one which can no longer be exorcized by the ‘white words’ that Emmanuel Mounier so rightly feared. The moment has passed for white lilacs on crosses or daisies between the teeth of skulls, for, as T.S. Eliot so masterfully put it, ‘The end is where we start from.’ Readers rest assured: These pages have not been written in the spirit or style of a ‘war veteran’. The battle into which we entered by chance started at the world’s beginning, and we were simply ephemeral witnesses to it. Lazarean dreams and realities are like the two grimacing faces of the same life in desperate straits, whose human profile fades into nothing, whose eternal contours become so swiftly deformed. Never before has the destiny of men been preyed upon to this extent – prepared in advance and then ransacked by the manifold experiences that tirelessly continue to penetrate the heart of a world suffering the evils of chaos. We allow ourselves to live in spiritual magma where our consciences, like flowing lava, harden around the nerve centres of our abjection. We are reduced to mere

30 | jean cayrol

images, frozen in a state of contraction, into which heat is no longer capable of penetrating. We long to walk a path that no longer caves in under our feet. Manna from heaven falls on us like snow on water: no sooner does it fall than we make it disappear. What is more, we are in need of some landmarks to help us along the inhuman and frightening path down which we are being led. All that is left of our tomorrows is the stench of the abattoir. We are the corpses, lest we forget. Our desire was therefore to ‘convey’, unequivocally and without cheating, what a still recent past has taught us, blow-by-blow, as the expression goes. Healers abound, but those who come to rescue others, who must risk their lives, keep their distance from this frozen river that flows through the very heart of our world. They save themselves for the final autopsy, when only a single corpse will remain in their hands, when they will have to conclude. Without wishing to sound complacent, this attempt to awaken each one of us was an urgent one, for, already, the hunt’s horn is sounding out its bellicose mort. It is time these volunteer defenders of the human spirit are trained in the use of the only real weapons that will never become outdated: truth and love. In the first part of this book, we wanted to describe the concentrationary or Lazarean proliferation that has occurred in the soft humus of daily life, and we have sketched out the internal battle-like commotion which has allowed man to resist, be it with no resources or reserves. This incredible defence is one which will endure into the future. We have provided proof that man never remained unreconciled, even in a universe of prostration. On the contrary, he made sure his soul was impregnable – this was all that remained of his innate breath in the face of the monstrous wind that ushered in an all too fervent catastrophe, a wind that blows impatiently and champs at the bit like Apocalypse’s horses, waiting to break into a gallop. We testify to the soul’s invulnerability throughout all of its suffering and agony. It is always able to find its way back to its ‘natural element’, despite the enormous hands of a giant and inhuman history. It knows how to slip through its fingers like an eel longing for its river water. It has no fear of leaving its temporary mortal coil, for it will take on an even more wonderful form; it is endlessly reborn, for mass graves for the soul do not exist, as far as we know. Docile executioners, have you ever heard of such a thing? The miracle takes place in the darkness, for the Lazarean man resides not in the bare and desolate stones of a tomb, and will not allow himself to be eaten away by the insatiable worms of tyranny. He has found a way to confront his suffering, to shoulder his solitude, to face up to it. He has established prodigious contact with the Other Inhabitant of a grave where death has been vanquished by Life. It is clear that we are entering into humanity’s sleepless night; never will we have enough burning wicks of memory to light our way, to save us from being caught unprepared.

lazarus among us

| 31

But though man may, in his triumph, and in the repeated wonders of his ‘illuminating’ conscience, repeatedly save himself and simultaneously save the shaken community in which he lives, the stigmata will still not fade from his body. Wounds may disappear, but scars remain; they are fragile; they can open up afresh. The thorns work away carefully at his flesh, they are indelible. This is why, in the second part of the book, we attempt to study and bring to light the mysterious corruption of our world by this concentrationary or Lazarean element, and we endeavour to trace an outline of the dreadful but all the same true face of a man who seems stricken in the very depths of his soul and spirituality. Caught in this Lazarean grip, he struggles and seeks help and relief. Only in his sickness does he find his temerity, in his infirmity his audacity. He lays himself open only to the sword. This emaciated and suffering hero might tomorrow be you, this paralysed and hardened heart might very soon be yours, if we are not able to learn how to be solitary and patient heroes. Up until now, life has triumphed, but let us watch out for the day when we no longer realize that we are alive, when we consider our hopes unspeakable, on that inoffensive day when we are no longer on our guard against the assaults of a gaze ‘emptied of the power to love’.

Lazarean Dreams

As for me, I have found my black tulip, I have found my blue dahlia! —Baudelaire

Preamble For nearly three years now, Concentration camps and their historians have been revealing and making available for one and all the ways and customs of this regime of exception. However, one of its darkest aspects has not yet been brought to light, either due to lack of information (the dead cannot speak), or because it has been forgotten or neglected: I am talking about concentrationary dreams. Those who have had intense experiences of these cannot avoid or reject them, passing them off as the unconscious and inoffensive residue of those dark years, for, even today, they continue to live through their most unexpected transformations and startling deviations. These images, in the moment incoherent, live on in them with the same level of intensity; they do not become blurred, but, on the contrary, succeed in explaining them and give meaning to their dénouement. They have constituted visions of help extended to a world now only audible in the very echoes of night, and in the ecstasy of forbidden landscapes: forbidden yet faithful to those who possessed the keys. Concentration camps revealed themselves as much during the prisoner’s days as during his nights; dreams became a way of safeguarding oneself, a sort of ‘maquis’, a retreat from the real world, in which man was forever faithful even to the strangest reflections of his destiny and continuity. This state of unreality, along with his nocturnal no man’s land, became the best form of defence against the human reality he was experiencing in its purest form. The prisoner would lock up all his powers of love, freedom and happiness in the closed deposit box of his dreams; he would emerge so haunted that he would often brave the potential difficulties and spend a few moments of his morning ‘harvesting’ dreams with his fellow inmates. For him, this was not only an urgent need to escape, to flee his own now unacceptable existence, but also a way of acknowledging and drawing closer to his old life. He lived in the shadow of a dream that he felt guaranteed his future; he would testify to

34 | jean cayrol

the fact that he could overcome that which was killing him; the prisoner would feel the earth firm beneath his feet even in the most peculiar of dreams. These iridescent night time perspectives were superimposed on his everyday existence and gave him the possibility of being ‘elsewhere’, to be with others without being like others; they helped him to refuse totally daytime’s horrible grip, and provided him with different ‘intonations’ (do not forget that the gaze of a deportee was one of a man who had seen too much; a gaze that looks past obstacles and contemplates that which blinds him). The prisoner would constantly assume a fictional life which doubled his other life; as such, talking about recipes, which we so often did without understanding why, meant he was able to eat the repugnant soup and transformed the taste of the mouldy bread; for each one of us, the table was laid at lunchtime. Every minute of every day that had to be lived through thus had its double version, something that gave us all the impression of living in a ‘waking dream’ in this Dantesque noviciate, the impression of stupor or even of fascination when faced with both the smallest of a day’s details and the lurking executioners – something that allowed us to suppress the notion of time. After all, from 1943 camp inmates referred to themselves as the ‘living-dead’, did they not? Each moment possessed another side that could only be decoded by those who had been initiated, which we had been, and for some this ability came from the internal radiance their nocturnal dreams could sometimes leave behind indefinitely within them. In passing, let us note the disparity between the notion of everyday time, which quite escaped the prisoner because of the appalling nature of what he had to endure, and that sudden revelation of a ‘timeless’ time, preserved and fossilized in his dreams, which eternalized his being, so to speak; he was tossed between the secrecy of his true human existence and the hellish replication of the concentration camp. The prisoner was the master of his sleep; the SS had no power or authority over those few hours when everything that had been lived through was re-imagined in a paroxysm of supernatural visions. This sleep was very often not very restful; it became like a shrine to a past that, although on the verge of extinction, was transfigured when but a few flashing images managed to make up an accurate sketch of returning home. For each one of us this sleep was proof of his not giving in, the positive to the negative of his daytime life. In this fiat nox. a dream was like an almond that no one was to crack. Inside, immaculate and intact, hid the secret that allowed some to survive, along with a strange explanation of their salvation. This helped to stem the evil; the prisoner had had everything taken away from him, but he kept the essentials: dreams made flesh. His exile only came to an end at night. I was so familiar with the powers possessed by this double existence that characterized both prison and concentration camp inmates alike, that I am able to give you the following example:

lazarean dreams

| 35

Every book that we had read quickly became unbearable for us, frail readers that we were; for sometimes we believed we could trace our own failing existences in the merest of the hero’s actions, in the most trifling of his words, as though there was a correspondence between the dangers that the characters had to face and our own. Not only did we subject ourselves to reading a story whose final chapter we feared we would never be able to read, but also everything in the book would become a premonitory sign or a foreshadowing symbol for tomorrow; here our futures were told. So, in this way, for a few days in my cell in Fresnes, I thought that my life would only last the two months that Julien Sorel had to live after he was condemned to death. Any reading of Malraux would leave our nerves on edge, with no defence, like sacrificial lambs. I have never since experienced this trembling, this iridescence when reading. A book was immediately and definitively accepted or disowned. Travesties of style, parodies, fake embellishments, in a word all novelistic bric-a-brac fell away; one judged a book like one judges a man; we went straight to the heart of the matter, passionately, urgently. There was, therefore, a continual flow of material for dreams, a kind of fermentation, perhaps entirely retrospective, which prevented the prisoner from accepting his condition; for, at all times, he was living against something, either against his torturers, or against himself or against fear and all its substitutes. He was permanently on the lookout, lying in wait at a door that could open onto the image of his own death or a blow from which he could not get up, seeming always to be naked, helpless and familiar only with solitude diluted by the presence of his guardians, a tangible solitude, a solitude that could turn on him. But the dreams kept watch over him. Night and day, the prisoner would either be in a dream state or would be prone to passing into a forbidden and supernatural world. What must not be forgotten is the first and unforgettable vision of the concentration camp upon arrival. I can only bring myself to recall that of Mauthausen, at night, looming up from a hill under the glare of its searchlights. The profile of its Great Wall of China came into view, its low, squat citadel, Mongolian in appearance. The scene was a ‘striking’ one, set off by the very ‘expressionist’ setting, and even more so, one noticed the cataleptic demeanour that this absent and remote world suddenly took on. In our encounters with the camps, all things seemed to be more imagined than real; one died without knowing from where the blow came (I think back to a fellow inmate to whom I had to signal that he had been shot in the leg). In this way, he created a kind of concentrationary hypnosis for himself, a vague and tenacious obsession. Though we were left our lives, we were made to live in a state of hallucination, of disorientation cleverly maintained by roll calls, or expiatory ceremonies, or disinfection scenes where the grotesque, the atrocious and the absurd all mingled together. We had entered into a dark pantomime and within us shone the only reality: the reality of our dreams. Moreover, in this astonishingly transfigured and disembodied climate where the body was denied (this was a world beyond torture; in the camps, just one blow and

36 | jean cayrol

the body was sacrificed, ready only for the scrap heap), this sensation of waking dreams became stronger and stronger, as the prisoner became more and more ‘refined’ in his dreaming, more enthusiastic, more purified. In the commotion of our dreams, we had found a new kind of spiritual food; this was the bread of dreams, dreams capable of ‘containing our long-cherished hopes’. More often than not, what strengthened the prisoner was this unique capacity to alienate himself from his current situation; his strength and resistance became extraordinary because at the moment when he was being beaten or taunted, suddenly before his eyes would appear the image of the old apple tree in his garden, or his skittish dog; he had been cornered by a poor image, a prayer, a secret, and he stood fast. In this way, he constructed a defence system for his subconscious, set off by the smallest of everyday events (oh! How beautiful the clouds were at sunset during the hateful roll call!). The prisoner was never there when he was being beaten, when he ate, when he worked. One winter morning, I remember watching the incessant comings and goings of some prisoners who were working in the camp’s small factory, and the way that suddenly, before their very eyes appeared the regal splendour of the Austrian mountains, golden and white, serene and lofty in their purity. There was nothing to be done, the factory was deserted, the kapos no longer had any power over their victims who, in a state of unconscious drunkenness and ecstasy, came to feed on this perishable vision, on this dream-like beauty; perhaps, they had managed to find themselves ‘anywhere but on this earth’. This searching for lost horizons where life took on the naive and simple forms of caricatures was all that we longed for – with all our wavering might. Our imagination, initially in a state of alert, little by little came to rest on great compositions à la Claude Lorrain, with glorious sunshine and legendary extravagance; thus, the only poem that became my replacement universe, inviolable but reliable, was Edgard [sic] Poe’s Annabel Lee. At night, in our dreams, we would go out. We were the ones who made the walls of our prison. How many times I visited the ‘land by the sea’ described by the poet. A kind of halo formed around us which protected us and separated us from the rest of the concentrationary world; what we saw with our eyes was no longer of any use to us; we had to live with our eyes shut, and it was inside us that life was played out; ‘Dreams, even despairing ones, gave us a place in the sun’ as Paul Éluard said. Our whole existence just served to amplify this kind of spiritual inebriety which spared us from falling into the abyss. Indeed, we were only familiar with the strangest, maddest and most bizarre manifestations of concentrationary society: a thousand caricatures of death where agony went unnoticed, strange military costumes from the Balkan Europe of 1914, the impressive and unchanging formalism of roll calls, spells of dizziness from lack of food, bloodthirsty and public rites of punishment, the petty court intrigues of block leaders, the extraordinary quest for soup in the complex and tight network of relationships, the banishment from concentrationary society of those with lice, and overall this, the close yet distant reign of the SS.

lazarean dreams

| 37

The merest of daily activities were out of place, and took on a sacred, absurd, false aspect, whose background was only experienced by certain privileged ones. Everything was now in rupture with the real, true world – the world that we had left a few months or a few thousand years ago, we could no longer tell which. We attempted to exist in two universes that contradicted and deformed one another: the savage and incoherent universe of the Camp was seen in a certain light because we still had one foot in the real world, thanks to the subterfuge of our memory and our dreams; and the real world to which we aspired, when in contact with concentrationary reality, took on a mysterious and confused ardour and flung us back into the extreme scenes of our reveries. A taboo universe: this is what we carried within us, along with its whole system of nocturnal worship, like how some Catholics dream about life after death, about the world’s hereafter with all its paradisiacal visions and final rewards. The Camp’s hereafter replaced terrestrial life’s hereafter. Little by little, the image of the real world became transfigured, embellished, became the Ideal Image of tomorrow’s world, a meticulously prefabricated image, which, at the moment of return, would cave in too brutally for some to cope with and would lead them to seek out, in suicide, the ideal image of the heavenly hereafter. To summarize, the image of the real world that the prisoner kept within himself turned out to be a questionable image, but all the same an ennobled, decanted, spiritualized one, which could only serve to pervert his return to the real world and increase his malaise, as it had to be continually be ‘surpassed’ when faced with the image of the Camp, endlessly re-gilded and lovingly created. We ended up, as a result of this internal rupture between two universes, living equally between two universes, without ever completely joining them, and this left us even more, and perhaps evermore, feeling as though we were wavering, in a state of mental vagrancy and rootlessness. Our real world only became real to us in our heart of hearts when performing its amazing miracles of reincarnation, in a prototype and unimaginable life where we were not sure we really existed. As for the unreal world of our camp, it buried itself deeper and deeper in a mythological society where the gods descended onto concentrationary territory to fight, avenge, ruin, metamorphose. The interior world whose oppressive image the breathless prisoner would sometimes allow to be extinguished, eventually brought us back ‘to the old human house’, as Georges Bataille put it. Before finishing this preamble, I ask myself whether I have the right to speak on behalf of everyone. You will simply find here an evocation of my humble experience, neither complete nor exhaustive, but nevertheless one which seeks to put ‘that old human house’ back in order, at the risk of no longer knowing where it is, what it wants, and why, so often, it leaves us empty-handed. I think with horror of the re-

38 | jean cayrol

finements that might be made to future concentration camps and of the ever stranger forms they might take on, where even man’s right to suffer might be taken away from him, the last resort of his nights; where he might be robbed of the unique and glorious strength that is found in each victim, and thus be made into a mere ‘object’ of disgust before the arrival of his executioners.

Prison Dreams Before analysing the few concentrationary dreams that I have been able to salvage from the wreckage of the last few years, I believe it would be useful to outline some prison dreams – that is, pre-concentrationary dreams. Moreover, it is helpful, but perhaps a little dangerous, to attempt to identify dreams that, in the pre-war period, heralded this concentrationary season. I can recall two dreams from that time that linger on in my mind; they formed an inexplicable leitmotiv for the events that I then had to live through. Already, they bore the concentrationary seal and carried within them the terrorism of nightmares in their purest form. Even then, fire played its part – a smouldering fire amidst a mass of books, and a trembling king nearby, wailing and screaming ‘I’m cold’; whilst at the door to the tower where this weak monarch lived, some men were using a pulley to erect an immense iron cross: very long and very thin. I also want to mention here a dream that a member of my family had in 1937, which woke up the whole house one night. This person had just seen our house surrounded by men in green holding flaming torches, setting fire to a barn into which they threw members of my family and countless people from our village. I am convinced that repetitions of the theme of fire can be found in the dreams from this revealing period. In a world even then horrified by its destiny, what panicfilled dreams emerged in each one of us! But let us return to the prison that served as an antechamber to the concentration camp, or, if you prefer, the marshalling yard for the accused. From the moment the suspect was put in the cell, the first series of dreams abounded, very vivid dreams, ones that held him spellbound all night long – those unsettled nights where surveillance lights were switched on every half-hour. The prisoner kept dreaming that he had not yet been arrested and that, at the very moment the police knocked on his door, he escaped. He found a thousand ways of escaping: gutters, roofs, jumping into thin air; the police could not catch him; this was the first way he reacted to his incarceration, denied his prison, refused it. In his dreams, he was never found, never discovered. This period of escape-dreams could last a few weeks, but he was already starting to notch up the days on his walls; they were starting to merge into one. He learned the language of the walls; his cell came to life: he might be caught in the act of writing in the hem of his handkerchiefs, holding conversations with the water pipes, or reading.

lazarean dreams

| 39

This was when the second wave of dreams began. The prisoner now admitted to the fact that he had been caught and imprisoned. He accepted his cell; he gave in and got a taste for his bread and the scant vegetables in his soup. But if in his dreams he felt as though he was in prison, the prison of his dreams took on more pleasant forms, became a place to stay where leisure time and respite breaks were possible. He dreamt that he had permission to go home at the weekend. He was given time off when he could return to familiar places and he had permission to do whatever he pleased. Perhaps, unbeknownst to him, he was like a Joseph K in The Trial; like a prisoner with a suspended sentence. He could go for a walk with his family and friends but he had to return to prison at a chosen and appointed time when the holidays were over. He went back to his prison as if to his job. Sometimes, he would have two or three dreams where he rebelled against this situation, where he arrived back late, but I can’t remember what happened in the end because the impression it gave him of becoming a ‘deserter’ quickly became intolerable and forced the prisoner to wake up suddenly. Even at this stage, an impression of dual reality [dédoublement] was taking shape in these prison dreams, an impression that was to become a permanent state of mind for the prisoner. These were also the last dreams that gave an accurate representation of former places of work, places where walks were taken, and those associated with married life. Long after this, these everyday images might reappear, but within them was a sense of life after return. In them, new meaning was to be found in the merest of objects; if, for example, during the concentrationary period, I dreamt of my garden, it was always the image of a winter garden with black trees and where the wind blew; adversity awaited me. The future could already be told in these dreams. Thus, life for the prisoner no longer possessed that tense and exasperated quality which it had in the first few weeks. He no longer revolted against an event over which he could have no control. There was a bit more play in his subconscious, in his imagination. He had acquired a certain amount of tolerance. From now on he might break out in song in his cell: Les temps des cerises was a typical refrain of this closed universe. Obviously, for many others, things were not so easy. Some could not cope with their cell, the heaviness of the night, the emptiness of their silence. In the meantime, snippets of increasingly surprising news from the outside world permeated, slightly easing up both day and night time for the prisoner (fighting in the streets of Berlin, Finland’s surrender, Turkey joining the war – all in 1942). The prisoner who ‘lasted’ now started to organize his life, adopting various habits in order to remain calm: sweeping and then cleaning his floor with the tip of his broomstick during ‘slack’ periods, waiting for parcels from the Quakers, hunting down flies and bugs; he enjoyed listening to an unknown comrade announce the time by imitating the bells of Westminster. As soon as dawn drew to a close, he could expect a certain amount of peace, despite the showers, the searches, the handcuffs, the soup; for the critical moment had

40 | jean cayrol

passed: the wakeup call when prisoners would be called out to court or for interrogation. Once the enormous conch that was Fresnes hushed down again and regained its silence, punctuated only by the sound of boots, the prisoner would await the ‘slops’ rounds, and most of all his turn to request paper, required for obvious reasons, but also very important to him as on it he could make out fairly recent news of the war or politics, or odd chapters of novels, and this gave him a sense of the present. The printed word held bewitching powers without limit. I was able to make it through a few weeks in a cell thanks to a paper bag from a grocer’s on which was printed the word ‘Excelsior’ and an address in Bordeaux. But all this takes us away from the subject. I am only relating a few facts in order to give you a sense of ‘atmosphere’, as they say nowadays. The second series of dreams lasted a few weeks, as the prisoner gradually settled into his new cell and acquired certain habits – some as comical as others were mystical. Then, at night, he would return to his dreams, apart from the night when they came to look for hostages. “Hurry up, hurry up gentlemen” could be heard, along with the sound of barking dogs. He was now ready for a third wave of dreams. He was leaving behind the world of facile, simple, clear images for a world of images whose sumptuousness, radiance and beauty continue to move me deeply, even today. It was at this time that his emaciated body started to show its first signs of weakness. The prisoner no longer even had the desire, so strong at the outset, to take the fortnightly ten-minute walk which he was allowed during the summer. This took place in another cell, but a kind of open air one, which made it all the more terrible as its ceiling was none other than the sky and the clouds. The fresh air and the green of the trees in the distance would seize him. It was all too intense for him, and he would spend long hours in his cell recovering from the first few paces around this miniscule patch of grass and hemlock overlooked by a balcony where angry guard dogs growled. Upon returning from his walk, he would suddenly feel even more fragile and defenceless; he had believed he was getting on alright in his cell, but after his walk, everything was called back into question. He had grown used to his silence, his fears, to the bareness of his walls. And now suddenly he could see glimpses of real life, faces at windows in the distance. He also quickly lost his breath, and walking round in circles like that on his own soon became difficult and then intolerable. Outside his cell, which despite everything had become his shell, he felt naked, more than ever disarmed and weak. As soon as he returned to his four walls, he would recover a false sense of protection and return to the strange smell that emanated from his food parcel, mouldy after a night spent on his shelf. Here, he believed himself to be ‘beyond reach’. The walk had exposed him to his guards in a situation where he was unsure of himself, where they saw him for what he really was – faltering, dazzled, and walking like a drunkard because of his shoes with no laces. Thus, it is understandable how much, for some, this third wave of dreams that I mentioned earlier was appreciated. Already on the inside of his cell, the prisoner was given an even deeper retreat, where no one could reach him. He took refuge in the deepest volute of his subconscious

lazarean dreams

| 41

like a hermit-crab that hides in the depths of its shell when the enemy approaches. This was a cell within a cell, and with it came all the delights of dreaming and its refinements, unceasingly deployed. These were landscape dreams, landscapes in their most precious moments; for example, a glade at eight in the morning when the ground is still wet with dew. He was now ready for the great concentrationary dreams.

Concentrationary Dreams From the very beginning of his time in the concentration camp, despite the various horrors of his daily struggle, the prisoner knew how to savour all that the night had to offer. Forced to get up throughout the night due to the diuretic effects of the soup, he was able to gaze upwards at the starry sky, even when having to trudge barefoot across the snow; then he would bury himself in sleep again, for those brief but intense hours. In this way, as I have already mentioned, a sort of community of unrepentant dreamers was formed whose members, from morning’s first light, would exchange their impressions of the night. Landscape-dreams were the most common: for the most part vast panoramas whose horizons stretched away to infinity. I cannot help but recall that wonderful quote by Pierre-Jean Jouve: ‘Though far away, the blue mountains are like sweet hymns’. All that was naive in us took refuge amongst these motionless horizons and their horizontal lines, veritable landscapes of ‘human innocence’. The faces of our family were already starting to fade away; we were losing sight of them. It must not be forgotten that we were constantly under the spell of musical memories. Music played a significant role in the lives of inmates. Very often, during our hardest labour at the quarry, a melodious phrase would accompany us; it would come to our lips without us knowing its origin or destiny. Some of us, and even I did not escape this, composed music. Songs, old melodies, laments, even the most worn out old pieces came back to mind, clearer than our telephone numbers or the names we so desperately wanted to remember. All this, along with the utterly free compositions of our dreams, contributed to the creation of a universe at once impalpable and haunting. At times, landscape dreams would disappear, and in their wake would appear dreams about architecture where the baroque, that art between sky and earth where cloud is sculpted like wood or marble, was present everywhere. Soaring vaults, infinite pillars, sculptures of air came together, mingled; abundant air surrounded these forms, one could breathe easier; the body was virtually weightless. By means of an example, here is a typical dream: I arrived in a cathedral whose roof was shrouded in mist. High up in the entranceway, a knight, still alive, was nailed to the ceiling along with his horse; he barely moved. I continued and entered an unusually large chapel. Inside was a massive altar, golden, baroque in style and made up of giant sculptures that bore all its weight on their trembling shoulders.

42 | jean cayrol

An enormous crowd was circulating, in costumes from all centuries. I then went down into an underground passage where characters re-enacted various scenes; I saw monks eating and bowls of fruit covered in dust. I approached a large painting by Breughel [sic] called The Underneath of a Table. In it, a little girl with golden hair was stretched out under a long table, near one of its carved legs. She was surrounded by drapes of table cloth and the legs of guests. The little girl then gradually came to life and I could see her fighting with the shadows, with beasts who wanted to drag her down into their depths. This silent struggle lasted for a few moments, and then the little girl froze again, along with the whole painting. Once again she became altogether flat in her stiff and shiny dress; the show was over. I also walked through the rooms of a gallery with magnificent furniture, but the paintings, instead of being on the walls, covered the floor; one was forced to step on them. One of them depicted the inside of a giant peanut. Indeed, paintings played an important role in these dreams. I remember a fellow inmate from Luxemburg who, so to speak, mounted his dream as if on an easel, so that he could compose and paint it. One morning, when I went to see him (he was one of the camp’s greatest dreamers), he told me about one of his dreams. He had imagined, with amazing clarity and simplicity, Lucifer in the form of the angel of evil, scintillating and multicoloured, with immense wings, a vision of infinite richness. He was going down a well, made of dull and bare stones, on an iron ladder; he held out his hand to us, as if to help us descend with him. I may add that this fellow inmate not only composed original scenes with perfect technical skills, but also chose amazing stories in which one could discern a kind of very sophisticated novelistic fiction. They unfolded with a great many intrigues, imbroglios, thwarted love affairs, in countries like Italy. I must speak to you of other dreams, more prosaic, but all the more tormenting. We all had one of these dreams at least once a week. They were about food, depicted in unbelievably lavish detail. One morning, one of my friends, one of our country’s great academics, explained patiently and at great length, as if describing an extremely rare insect, the structure, shape and ingredients of some ‘religieuses’ éclairs about which he had just dreamt. We would awake with saliva streaming down our blankets. These dreams were not had in the dead of night; they always appeared at the edge of dawn. I also want to speak to you of another series of diabolical dreams, dreams with no mercy. They had perhaps reached a state of paroxysm: inmates dreamt that they were shut up in concentration camps, therefore for them, there was no rest, no respite; the dreams themselves went bad like fruit. I dreamt of concentration camps, but this time they were idyllic ones. My whole family was there; we lived in sort of caves that opened onto prairies; there were even flowers and trees in them. It was as though I had invited my family to come and spend some time with me; maybe I was the only one who knew it was a concentration camp.

lazarean dreams

| 43

We did not have erotic dreams; our physical deterioration, our obsessive hunger, our tiredness, added to which were the searing memories of blows we had received, left us incapable of dreaming, even for an instant, of a woman we might love or desire. There was just one night when I spent hours breathing in the smell of a woman’s hair; “only a woman’s hair”, as Swift once said. I am only talking about a category of prisoners that I know well here, those who were part of Nacht und Nebel, those who received no packages or news, and who were completely cut off from the world of the living. It is very important to emphasize this absence of erotic dreams, this affective void, this castration of sorts, because for some inmates, upon returning home, this has been one of the defects left by the Camp – this lack of affectivity, the impossibility of showing affection. This was illustrated most terribly by one of my friends who has since died, in those words he whispered to his wife: “I can’t come to you, I can’t touch you.” For some, especially the young who had had little contact with women, this could be made even worse if the inmate didn’t have the strength to fight off his horrendous solitude. I know of several cases. Since their return, some couples affected by deportation live together in a state of indifference, numb to what previously was their intimacy, their shared tastes or thoughts. An important part of their past lives and an essential part of their continuing love for one another has been cut off from them. This is especially noticeable when the man and the woman were deported at the same time. We have even been able to note a curious and terrible metamorphosis that one of them undergoes in the dreams of his or her partner. We are able to cite the case of a deportee trying to strangle her husband at night because, in her nightmare, she thought he was a member of the Gestapo. In those households where there is, if you like, a camp rivalry, lengthy silences can be noted, and absences which surprise neither one nor the other. They live separately, all the while maintaining the same lifestyle, the same familiar and daily rituals. Things become more complex when only one spouse was deported, the other one not able to understand the inmate’s attitude and evasions, the way he keeps his distance with a kind of willed vulgarity, as though he means to conserve his Lazarean attitude in all its purity. Finally, it goes without saying that a kind of sexual mania took hold of some of the younger inmates upon their return from the camps. This is understandable, but their anguished thoughts of survival meant that unconsciously they attempted to degrade their new existence and endure it only by means of astonishing selfishness, treating it lightly, reducing it to absolute animality.

Salvation Dreams Now I come to the chapter at the heart of the subject: the most important kind of concentrationary dream. It is only since interviewing my fellow inmates that I dare write it.

44 | jean cayrol

Until now, I have not spoken of colour in concentrationary dreams, as it was light alone which lent them depth. Contrary to what Gérard de Nerval might have said, ‘in dreams the sun can never be seen’, many of our dreams were bathed in sunlight. I can still see, as if before my very eyes, the blast of sunshine that struck me when opening some French windows in a sleepy living room, and the way it scattered as it lit up an enormous bunch of white lilacs, as bright as lightning suspended in motion. In these untamed dreams, only faded hues existed, barely visible blues, gentle purples; the green of the trees was delicate and soft. I noticed that one colour could dominate or be repeated in certain dreams; either a colour that reminded the prisoner of a particular event that had occurred at the moment of his incarceration, or else a colour born out of an essential part of his existence, his faith for example. This colour might appear just once, as if to fish the prisoner out of death’s deep waters, its vividness catching his eye, hooking in his gaze; or else it would pursue its luminous trail throughout numerous dreams, and by its joyous repetition, change the very way of life of an inmate. This colour was the colour of salvation itself, ‘hoisted high up on the dream’s mast’, heralding his return, the certainty of return, the formal reassurance that the prisoner could emerge from his Passion alive, descend from his cross before the final hour, or find a way out of his Garden of Gethsemane. I think back to what Balzac wrote, and which I recently reread – it will help lend weight to what I am saying: ‘If colour is made up of organized light, should it not, like arrangements of air, have a meaning?’ I need not insist on the role and appeal of colour in poetry; I have only to mention Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Lafcadio Hearn, Apollinaire, René Char, etc., and the power that colours hold to ‘brighten, embellish, recast’ nature and the feelings it inspires in us: some would even say colours possess supernatural powers. Here though, given the extreme state of the man who for weeks, months and years has had but a few moments to live, colour liberated; this was Grace’s dazzling revenge, the brush of its wing in the darkness of the night. The prisoner could be saved by the greatness of a single colour. All of man’s invincible strength emanated from the ‘cry’ of this sacred and primeval colour, from this remembrance of man as a visionary, from this instinctive recollection of the divine. Here are some examples that I have collected:

Dreams with Recurring Colours: Blue In successive groups of dreams that I had during my concentrationary period, a particular type of blue appeared, not disseminated throughout the vision, but concentrated in one detail, for example in someone’s eyes or in the dresses of schoolchildren in a garden; it was as though everything else faded away and only this deep yet pale blue lingered on. Every time I had a dream with blue in it, in the morning, upon waking, I would have the distinct impression that I was protected by this colour. For a few hours I would be invaded by a sense of well-being.

lazarean dreams

| 45

For a while, blue disappeared, but then one night, I dreamt that I was walking down a street and suddenly I saw my mother leaning out of a window. I ran towards her, and she held out both hands to me, hands that were blue. I called them good news hands. It was at this moment I felt certain I would return from concentrationary hell. How can I not quote here Lafcadio Hearn: ‘Being the visible colour of our planet’s soul, of the world’s life-breath, blue is also the visible colour of the hugeness of day and the abyss of night.’

Dreams with Recurring Colours: Green One fellow inmate who I interviewed assured me that throughout all the dreams he had had in the camp, doors were always the colour green and therefore ‘auspicious’ – this for him was a sign that he would one day be able to open them. Dreams without Recurring Colours but with an Explosion of One Colour: Red One of my friends, a priest and now a teacher, related the following to me: During his detention at Mauthausen concentration camp, he had this dream: He found himself with one of his friends kneeling before Christ nailed to the cross. Suddenly Our Lord burst open and His Blood spilled out of his disembowelled body and over the two kneeling men. The priest whispered, ‘The blood of Christ covers and protects us, we are saved.’ A month later, the priest fell ill. He was ravaged by pleurisy and had a temperature of 40°C. Considering him as good as dead, the nurses threw him out into the snow, completely naked. He lost consciousness and for a few hours did not move and was dying. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a block whose members had taken him in. He was warm and had been wrapped in a red blanket. The fever had broken, he was saved. In passing, it is interesting to note that red blankets were extremely rare in camps. I personally never saw one. A law student told me his story: He had been arrested during the cherry-picking season, around the month of June. On the day of his arrest, his mother told him that he would come back home in time for the cherry season. She was able to send him a package of them in prison. Then he was moved to a concentration camp. He fell ill. His temperature was increasing, and he could see that there was no chance he would return home; little by little his heartbeat slowed down. He perhaps lost consciousness, he wasn’t sure, but suddenly, he saw before him a kind of flag whose colours burst forth as if torn open. The colour red had returned, the red of the cherries. As soon as the vision was over, he opened his eyes; his heartbeat had returned to normal, the fever had broken, and he was able to make it to the end of his ordeal. He returned home in the month of June 1945, in time for the cherries.

46 | jean cayrol

Dreams with No Explosions of Colour: Diamond One of my fellow inmates, a former sailor, a realist and a man of great courage, came and found me one day in the Gusen concentration camp to tell me about the following dream that had moved him deeply. He found himself out at sea on a steam boat. As he was leaning over the railings on deck, he noticed a small boat with a man sailing it who shouted, ‘Hey, can you see the sky, Sir?’ Unable to understand the meaning of this, he asked the man to repeat what he had just said. The man again shouted, ‘Can you see the sky?’ At that moment, my friend looked up. A thick mist covered the surface of the water; he could barely make out the black outline of the ship’s bow. Then suddenly, the mist lifted, the sky tore open, and upon the far horizon there rose an immense diamond cross, sparkling brightly upon the swell of the sea. We all agreed, after hearing about this remarkably beautiful dream, that it couldn’t but bring good fortune to the one who had had it. That dream did us all good. It was like an illustration of Rimbaud’s words: ‘Upon the sea, which I loved as though it had washed me clean of some stain, I saw the consolatory cross ascend.’ This dream perhaps possessed ‘life-changing secrets’. My friend did return home, but I wonder if he still remembers that dazzling and supernatural image, the promise of his return. We could continue with an exploration of other colours, especially yellow, which repeatedly appeared in many people’s dreams, but these descriptions risk becoming tedious and would not accurately render these nocturnal compensations, highly charged as they were with hope. Descriptions such as these might give a false and unrealistic impression of the camps to those who seek to deny the suffering, the anguish, the utter deprivation of the living dead, to those who believe that all descriptions of these principalities of murder are fabrications.

Dreams of the Future To finish this rough essay on concentrationary dreams, I want to make reference to one of the most painful and unrelenting signs that showed that the real world continued to occupy the consciences of inmates: dreams of the future. From the moment they arrived at the camp, a great many of my fellow inmates began to think about their future, to sketch out plans for their future life, to draw up plans or improvements they would make to their former homes. For some among them, this descended into a kind of desperate exasperation, a state of morbid feverishness, and a sign of their impending demise. We gradually came to understand, and any inmate would confirm this, that those who succumbed to this obsession with returning home would die. Whenever I saw one of my dear friends, pencil in hand, tracing the outlines of his future home, I knew that he would not be capable of resisting for very much longer. The End’s great euphoria had set in. Maybe they were designing their final resting

lazarean dreams

| 47

places, digging their own graves. I can still see one of my friends as he fell down dead beside me, just before he had put the finishing touches to his design for the perfect garage. Every man felt in the depths of his soul that he shouldn’t ever dream, during the day or at night, of what might become of him; it was not for us to know. This was the rule of thumb for the seasoned inmate: live quietly with the minimum of thoughts and feelings. Even those who lost members of their families to the camp had to be prevented from crying. As one kapo told me: ‘Here there is nothing; love and friendship do not exist; in this place, everything must be suppressed.’ The domain of return was a forbidden domain. It was not to be spoken of, never to be thought of. This was our motto. But dreams about it came to us, and were a sign to us that we had not been forsaken.

Post-Concentrationary Dreams At this point, and not without some degree of apprehension, we might well ask ourselves about the kind of dreams ex-inmates have, and whether there are any nocturnal consequences of all that their bodies and minds have had to endure. There is indeed a ‘post-scriptum’ to add. Alas! Concentrationary terror continues to occupy the subconscious of many an inmate, but this time it is a terror decanted over time, its murky dregs deposited in the deepest recesses of the dreams this wretched man must now experience. At night, in the world of his nightmares, the more or less tangible traces of these dregs must be tasted afresh. The whole atmosphere of our dreams has changed. The concentrationary climate has infiltrated our everyday dreams, spread throughout them like an oil stain on paper, leaving behind an unmistakable and unforgettable taste in our mouths – we cannot fail to recognize it. A fellow inmate at the Mauthausen-Gusen camp who I have just met with told me about a dream to which he had recently ‘been subjected’. It is a typical dream, but also entirely concentrationary in nature. I need say no more. He found himself suddenly covered in lice that were golden-yellow in colour. They were swarming all over his body, and he desperately tried to stop them spreading to his wife who was asleep next to him. Dreams have once again become the nightmares of peace-time. They are painful, they make us gasp for breath and cause our hearts to thump in our chests. I will now describe two dreams, different in nature to the ones I have previously mentioned, but representative of all dreams of this type. They illustrate just how much power this dark period still exerts over us, and over all that we are. Only bringing them before the very eyes of God could put a stop to their powers of corruption. Dreams of this type are different for each one of us, their forms more exaggerated for some than for others, some more vivid than others, but all possess a worryingly aggressive quality which provokes a pervasive sense of foreboding. They put pressure

48 | jean cayrol

on the mental state of some people and cause physical side effects, sometimes even triggering strange cardiac symptoms. The first dream depicts the victim-perpetrator relationship and demonstrates all its most terrible and subtle perversions. A man has just been killed and is lying on the floor, covered in blood. The killer approaches him, bends down, and with patient hands begins to disfigure his face. Altering his features, he etches out lines on his skin, enlarging his mouth, so that in the end the victim will end up with the same face as his killer and, in his death, bear all the weight of his crime. The second dream will strike a chord, perhaps unconsciously, with those inmates who believed it a ‘privilege’ to pass through a camp, convinced it was a kind of ‘initiation’ necessary in order to get through to the next levels of human life. Here it is: In order to become a man and be accepted in modern society, all men must undertake some kind of forced labour and suffer various bodily humiliations. As a consequence, the man returns with various parts of his face missing, which are then replaced by pieces of pink cardboard. One can see just how deep the camp’s stinging memory goes, and what damage it is capable of doing. It has even been reported that some former prisoners can start raving at night; one of them screamed at his wife: ‘Can’t you see that snake’s head right next to me?’ A camp inmate must not remain as such all his life, for it is down to each one of us to take responsibility for our involvement in this unmerited condemnation, suffered in such desolate solitude. All those who return carry with them the weight of this dreadful meditation, and rare are those who manage to escape without leaving behind the better part of themselves: how can it be possible to tolerate seeing such unbelievable sights for all those years? ‘Life dreams to me’, Michaux once said. The black message of the camps has not yet faded away, and some are destined to go on living under its lie, attempting to make out the letters of its signature, ever unreadable for all those who no longer desire to remain perpetrator or victim.

Lazarean Literature

There is nothing to explain. Concentration camps have been suffered in different ways by their victims. Some are dead as a result; others are dying slowly, cut off from their return, and growing old within a larval, half-extinguished terror; many live with the camps and attempt to carve out a path for themselves through that Elusive Camp that, again, surrounds them, casts its spell over them, and makes them lose their way. The emotional shock remains, stronger than ever, the stench of its maddening misery cropping up even in the most well-hidden and peaceful of life’s backwaters: more than ever, it reeks of the concentrationary. And those who only know about the camps by hearsay are starting to suffer from the major tics of this universe. Though today we may thrust aside the tortured body that appears from under the blade of a plough, or hold our tongues to give everyone the chance to be human, it is also true that concentrationary influence and anxiety are growing ceaselessly, not only in their uninterrupted effects (one thinks of new geographical maps on which the principalities of Murder have been drawn to show new ‘explorers’ these territories of desolation) but even more in the European and even worldwide psyche. Literature capable of living through the final death throes of an intellectual capitalism in ruins never has enough material for all its writers – well-known or unknown. Can it too be renewed by an intimate relationship with this demonic effervescence? Can it be capable of sketching out a kind of concentrationary literature, thus creating the characters for a new Inhuman Comedy, and, to use a word that is in fashion, a concentrationary realism for every scene of our private lives? I have to admit straight away to certain mistrust, certain malaise when faced with such a spiritual quest in which traditional psychology will be done away with; but it is not possible to gloss over the influence that the concentrationary still seems to have over our souls, the powers of fascination it has over certain nations. Our very close future may feel the first manifestations of this, may witness a rebirth of its strange cohorts. There is no such thing as a concentrationary myth, just a concentrationary everyday reality. It seems to me that it is time to testify to this strange outbreak of the Concentrationate (‘Concentrationnat’), to its timid entry into the world in which we live, born out of great fear. We bear its stigmata. It is, moreover, not absurd to envisage an Art directly born out of such human convulsion, out of a catastrophe that shook the very foundations of our conscience,

50 | jean cayrol

an Art rather ill-suited to the blackmail so often employed by any literary trend, an Art that, in its very creation and methods, would bear the name of Lazarean art. This already exists in a formative state in our literary history (it would be easy to locate a diurnal and nocturnal side to its development). And this Art, whose nature is both exceptional and disconcerting, where the fantastic and the natural become confused, is in essence and at its paroxysm, only one of the many ordinary aspects that Art itself, unbeknownst to us, is gradually taking on – in literature, painting, music or in new art forms. It is possible to foresee – and indeed this is already something that can be detected in the work of some young painters – a kind of concentrationary or Lazarean current running through the inspiration for many exhibited paintings (continual repetitions of the same concepts, hypnotic shapes and spaces, interplay of colours, the panicky nature of objects, etc); the brushstroke refuses to bend to the demands of the wound, to take on its sinuous or trembling nature. Picasso is the finest example of this and could have installed his easel on the Appel-Platz at Mauthausen or Buchenwald. We are currently passing through an insidious period in contemporary painting, where anything could happen, anything could degenerate or alter without the painter even knowing in which hand he holds his brush, or with whose horrified gaze he perceives the irredeemable vision before his eyes. In literature, suggestions of this are more discreet, more measured; the writer still believes in the dogmas of Stendhal or Balzac; he knows what he will find, even behind the most tightly locked doors. He is at home in novelistic fiction, even if some writers, troubled by no longer seeing any name marked on those doors, advance with weapon in hand. Today, we await conquering writers who are not ashamed to step over the dead bodies or the putrefaction, and for whom, I am sure, the doors will open into the great kingdom of God; more than ever, we need writers of public salvation, those who are not afraid of getting their hands dirty, of descending into even the most depraved of souls: the illustrious house of man. Up until now, the testimonies from the camps that we have known and read have certainly been moving, but they have only shown one facet of the camps, the most spectacular, the most reliable, the most hideous, but this facet was only applicable up until the Liberation; after that, we no longer knew which mask it would put on. Only the books of Antelme or Rousset endure; they sketched out the general physiognomy of German camps, which are already being consigned to concentrationary prehistory. Many believe that we are now in the era of museums and victims’ associations; we reproach ourselves for thinking about any of it; we are suspicious of memories. Yet we allow even the most frivolous of activities to bathe in concentrationary light. One of my friends rightly remarked on this in one of those cellar nightclubs in the 6th arrondissement, whilst in the grip of a delirious dance reminiscent of youth initiation ceremonies in some Australian tribes or of some diversions popular in the camps (I think of the dying man who, at dawn, amongst a group of gypsies, was made to dance like a puppet). This sense of outburst, and the abandon accompanying it, the

lazarean literature

| 51

volubility of the dance, the frenzied worship of nothingness, the total lack of a sense of reality, the infinite repetition of the choreography, the refusal of a sense of time, etc., are premonitory signs of the new times that lie within reach of youth and all its enthusiasm. The only thing missing from this exhausted yet frenetic gathering was the Angel, the smiling angel of this loveless community who, like in Shakespeare’s verse, is ‘neither lord nor owner of his faces’. And whose idea was it anyway to think for an instant that the Camps remain unchanging, in spite of the passage of time, the changing seasons and hopes? Who wants to go on hearing the sound of their human misery? Even those who have been directly affected find themselves feeling like invalids whose state is difficult to describe, whose pain no one can define, whose healing no one can provide. They cohabit with their illness, the attacks they suffer, to the detriment of their very lives and at the cost of the ‘lost years’ since their return, impervious to the essential reasons for their existence. Out of this flows the self-conscious silence that can be observed in deportees, the lack of imagination when it comes to their experiences, the impression that time itself has been deported, the mute surprise they exhibit when spoken to. Indeed, many allow themselves to be invaded by an extraordinary Lazarean somnolence, by inertia, like that in Albert Cossery’s brilliant book, Les fainéants dans la vallée fertile, where, you will recall, even Christ’s beloved apostles are one night overtaken by the realm of torpor. And if deportees ever do succeed in finding themselves again, it is in a fake universe, in a denatured community, at the heart of which every member is utterly ambiguous, for, it is impossible to form a Veterans’ Association of the Seven Sorrows or an Association of the Cross, apart from that of the Church; we cannot meet up to exchange wounds like postage stamps; the memories are incommunicable. When considering the kind of life on the fringes that awaits camp prisoners, ought we not to ask ourselves whether there might also be a particular way of writing, of perceiving, of approaching things? Is there any such thing as a concentrationary style or literature, – apart from that of victims, who have nothing left to express – a literature in which all events, even the most familiar, seem incomprehensible, reprehensible, revolting, irritating and so extremely opaque, especially to the uninitiated – to the reader who refuses himself entry into the infernal game of concentrationary crumbling that takes place, and who will go to any lengths to smash the mirror of his own pain, so he can take refuge in the smug indignation and coddling peace of his soul? It seems to us that it is already possible to tease out some of the principles of Lazarean or concentrationary Art, and I believe it to be of utmost importance to reveal these principles, unveil all signs of them, and rip off all their masks, for fear of contagion. Nothing must be left in the shadows, for the darkness was so quick to come upon us. Indeed, if we go on being exposed to charnel houses in all their forms and to men who are beaten in public squares in China under the indifferent gaze of cameras, this

52 | jean cayrol

mysterious, subtle and still furtive Art might become the only kind of Art, inseparable from our fragile human condition, an art whose first historian and researcher was perhaps the troubled Albert Camus. For, the history of this subject can be traced. And to lend proof to this, all I need is the eighteenth-century Lazarean narrative written by the Abbé Prévost, Aventures intéressantes des mines de Suède. Here is an extract, and I quote, so as to remember it accurately: Everyone has heard about those much-vaunted mines in Sweden, in which it is asserted human dwellings exist, dwellings as regular as on the earth’s surface, inhabited by a great number of families who have their own chiefs, ministers, judges, houses, markets, shops and churches; indeed, nothing is lacking in them that might make up the most peaceful and well-policed of societies. In truth, those who belong to these societies are on the whole brigands that forced labour has made useful to the world, after having deserved to be banished for their crimes. But as no one who will willingly be of use in the mines is rejected, there are also many honest people whose poverty and suffering have reduced to this necessity. . . . An English traveller in Sweden searching out all things to do with fossils wanted to see these underground dwellings for himself . . . he descended into the most famous mine with the help of a machine. He discovered, as he had expected, groups of both sexes, but in a less flourishing state than he had imagined. The image of the most dreadful suffering greeted him everywhere he went. Their clothes, the holes he called houses, their food, everything exuded the horror of a ghastly prison. And sadness and pallor were painted on every face. This disturbing text, which even the Marquis de Sade did not omit to reuse, could form part of an anthology of concentrationary experience, along with certain passages from the ancients. I often think of Phalaris, the Sicilian tyrant, and creator of a bronze bull in which he locked up men and then heated with big fires; the screams of those poor men emerging from the mouth of the bull were supposed to imitate its bellowing. This is the first symbolic image of the Kremas. In the Abbé Prévost’s narrative, one can foresee Lazarean refinements: the subtle mix of criminals and innocent people, the community of sub-humans, the indescribable suffering, the victims’ unawareness and lethargy, etc. But let us take a modern text and try to enumerate the fundamental particularities of this contemporary literature. The obsessional originality inherent in it brings a tense and indifferent quality to this dark literature. These pages, which one deportee gave to me, are entitled Lumière dans les ténèbres.1 I will not speak to you of their contents; these are just notes written in the margins of a camp testimony, but it is the tone which is troubling and new, the same tone which one might use for a new set of Beatitudes. I will only take one sentence, which will allow me to emphasize the

lazarean literature

| 53

extreme terms employed by this literature of Apocalypse, and which form the first, extremely simplified and elemental aspect of any so-called Lazarean work: The Kapo arrived unexpectedly and urged us on as if we were horses pulling a cart stuck in the mud. And the day drew to a close under the golden rays which ushered in dusk. The ground froze hard. All I was wearing was a tattered jacket. Bent under the yoke, I did not suffer from the cold. We can see here, sketchy but visible, the two terms of this literature: the wonderful or magical quality represented by the words ‘and the day drew to a close under the golden rays which ushered in dusk’, and the everyday reality ‘the ground froze hard’. However, and this is essential, the wonderful or magical quality leads the real, subjugates it, dazzles it so completely that the prisoner no longer notices the cold. Thus we see here, the dual reality [dédoublement] of the Lazarean being, further amplified by his nocturnal dreams. This being lives on two distinct planes, distinct but nevertheless joined by an invisible thread, the plane of terror, and the plane of exaltation, that of exhilaration and that of detachment. I quote another passage from the same text, even more significant: Maurice suggested I attend his quartet rehearsal. I followed him into a block which had always seemed mysterious to me (the scene takes place in Buchenwald). Only a lucky few were allowed admission. This is where the pathologists worked. They dissected cadavers here, and wrote reports on diseases. The musicians took their places in this museum, where prisoners’ heads cut in two, diseased lungs, intestines, hearts and other internal organs soaked in jars. On the shelves were lines of heads, shrunken using the same methods as those of the Jivaros . . . I sat down, ready to hear one of Haydn’s quartets. Near me, half a face soaked in alcohol. Its eye was open. It stared insistently at me. Impossible to escape. Its gaze came from the hereafter, inexpressive and icy, but alive. I changed places, swapping this stubborn witness for some brain lobes through which narrow blood vessels ran. Haydn showered his grace upon this sinister collection. Maurice brought those sublime pages to life. And as for the prisoners on their straw mattresses, who, roused, propped themselves up on their elbows and strained their heads forward, it was as though they were emerging from a tomb. Mute, fascinated, they were under the charms of a miraculous apparition. They didn’t know that it was Mozart being played to them. They had been told, but they didn’t care about the name; this was music; it transformed them, they were transfigured . . . luminescence passed before their eyes, like heaven, whiteness so bright it brought tears to their eyes. They were resurrected from their rags, wondrously consoled and, when the incantation came to an end, they thanked Maurice, their missionary.

54 | jean cayrol

From this passage alone, we can draw some conclusions in relation to the kind of literature I envisage. In the Lazarean world, astonishment, surprise, or the unexpected do not exist; whatever might happen is lived through quite easily, without even questioning it. The permanent state of slackness in which the prisoner lives causes him to submit to what is exceptional as though to mere punishment, to the most absurd concoctions as though to mere distortions. Normal no longer means anything. Each creation is just as easily ‘done’ as ‘undone’ and in this way becomes unpredictable, inhuman. Nothing will ever be surprising anymore; any situation might appear or disappear, be re-formed or deformed, beyond the reach of the being that experiences it, in a kind of incantation peculiar to this diffuse Lazarean magic. We are living through an era – one I want to believe is transitory – which is abundant in this dreadful splitting of man into two, one part heavenly, the other part that of an unacceptable earth. ‘All that is bound in heaven will be bound on earth’, so says the gospel. And how could one not emphasize the extraordinary dereliction of this demonic universe where, indeed, nothing is held in, where everything is dispersed, spattered, where days seem temporary, unfinished, and nights do not care for sleep, where the sexual parts of a man are monstrous, enormous on his skeletal body, where bread crumbles away, where consciences are lax, where friendships break down, where everything is forever broken to pieces, where yesterday’s memories come undone, where the present is simply the whim of someone superior? In the time it takes to sharpen a pencil, like in Camus’s State of Siege, man is eliminated. A Lazarean text must bear witness to this overflowing agony that the whole of Europe has known in its exoduses, ghettoes, cellars and famines. Here he comes, the first man after the Torment, the hero of this tragic ‘Western’ whose ride has still not come to an end. The literary character thus takes shape, if not on the first page of a book, at least in the depths of our consciousness, along with his lack of discipline, his compliance in the face of what he experiences and what is killing him, his internal disorientation, his trapdoor to a triumphant world, light and vague where ‘treasure is buried’, forever haunted by the memory of that ‘dusk without dawn’ of which Senancour speaks. A Lazarean text will first and foremost be one that meticulously describes the strangest kind of solitude man will ever be capable of bearing. This is not a solitude for which there is a way out or exit. Each one of its ‘followers’ envelops himself in this solitude, like a well-fitting coat, shielding himself from the cruel assaults of the outside world. He is so vulnerable that he will adopt the habit of solitude as his sole means of protection, his only weapon. He will live in this state of isolation as though he knows not how alone he really is; losing himself in the crowd will no longer be just a figure of speech to him. He will set solitude to everything in his life, like one sets fire to curtains, to one’s own house, and he will live as though a judge had condemned him to a life of the most horrifying solitude, a desolate solitude, in which any human face seems forbidden. Yet this is an active solitude, not one of vague melancholy or ennui, as the romantics would have it. It is a living, moving solitude, and though it may devour the individual, it nevertheless acts as a substitute for conjugal passion,

lazarean literature

| 55

but where all that remains are pieces of washed up flotsam and dead shells, as though life itself had been extracted (I’m thinking of the solitude of Graham Greene’s Priest, from whose presence human beings recoil, but who still has something to live for, to exist for; the solitude that precedes grace or condemnation, where everything is easy prey, where man, though sensing the immeasurable, seeks in vain a way of quantifying, of measuring his soul). In this way, Lazarean literature will rely on this notion of solitude with a safety catch, so to speak, a solitude that can take on quite unbearable forms because it seems like a permission that must be granted. It is apparently capable of allowing its victim to live with others, but it is something to which he must continually return, as it is only possible for him to see and hear through the eyes and ears of his solitude. All things pass through a secret before reaching this voluntary prisoner; he belongs to something which belongs to no one. His solitude provides him with rest. He is only awake in his secret, in his Camp, and all other things are imagined in relation to this secret. By means of his solitude, he communicates with other mortals; he is able to go out and take in the air of the outside world, speak in a language of which he knows only imposture, but all the riches he has acquired he brings back to his secret, along with all his emotions. The Lazarean is never alone in his solitude; he devotes all his psychical time to this minotaur, inside him to the death. One sentence, which I read in a female deportee’s manuscript, seems to me an essential key in our understanding: ‘But how am I going to die?’ It mustn’t be forgotten that the deportee has been through his own death, condemnation and damnation time and time again. Is not the solitude in which he locks himself up there to resolve this frightful question that at times leaves him insensitive to problems in his every day or family life? In the camp he had already exhausted the various possibilities of dying, all the ways of experiencing agony and, the moment he came back, he understood the surprising freedom that death had bestowed upon him, the independence that he now had with regard to his own death. Within the confines of his return, he pushes the traditional limits of human existence: old age, accidents, illness. This is why this sense of isolation is inseparable from any Lazarean character; everything becomes a pretext for his solitude, for feeding and nurturing it. Lazarean literature finds its basis in the solitude where a human will live a life of extremes, with many troubles, and all the dangers that go hand in hand with coming in contact with powers whose names it is better not to mention. He will push his experience of evil to the limit, so as to explode the ‘Camp’s truth’. One could ask oneself how he might respond to the idea of suicide. He will only be attracted to it by its formalism, its ceremony; he might even take delight in imagining unexpected and new details; he will play with his own suicide like a cat with a mouse. He is not someone who will commit suicide, for this would be to renounce his concentrationary status, which seems like a privilege to him. It must not be forgotten that I am exaggerating the traits I describe.

56 | jean cayrol

So, what will his behaviour towards his own kind be like? Does he have any notion of his fellow man? I will cite a text given to me by a deportee. She recounts a dream that she had after her return, which explains quite well the way the passions might develop in a Lazarean text. I. My mother lives in a boarding house; she has me telephone her from time to time, but I realize with horror that I haven’t seen her for a month. I have let all that time go by without making the most of seeing her. I go to her bedside. She is not any better, she is not recovering well, but she is not quite like she was BEFORE, as she has not managed to escape the effects of deportation. II. I find father; he has just returned from deportation; my joy at seeing him is huge and indescribable. I throw myself into his arms and kiss him; he seems much thinner and in a fairly good state. . . . Then I take him to a show; we are sitting side by side; I keep asking him questions and suddenly am horrified when I realize that he has gone mad. . . . Oh! He is not completely mad, of course … it is no longer my father who I have sitting beside me . . . These two dreams fully explain what emotional relationships between characters in a Lazarean text might be like, as well as showing the tone they take. Firstly, these characters forget about the people dearest to them, they are totally indifferent towards those they love and at times feel a secret repulsion that makes them see the worst in everyone, they abolish all tenderness, and are easily disappointed, disappointment only liable to grow. Often, feelings of sympathy can become intolerable for the concentrationary hero. He removes all that might hinder him and is on his guard against anything that might cause him to surrender. He is swiftly overwhelmed and seeks to play the role of the stone guest at gatherings. In him, all desires are abolished, he contents himself with secret love, with lightning-bolt friendships, but is only comfortable in instability; he breeds indifference. Here we come to an essential aspect of his behaviour, the birth within him of parasitical love, accompanied by tenacious insensitivity. Lazarean literature is a chaste literature; it will not contain daring gestures or audacious words. He has not yet managed to reincarnate himself in any other world but his own. Any Lazarean character is a castrated being in whose subconscious the most unexpected after-effects persist, even to the point of becoming fiercely ascetic. He no longer knows how to grasp, hold, seize. Any contact could seem like molestation to him; he has difficulty seeing a body, the beauty of a shoulder, the purity of a profile. He knows only to repeat that which has just been said to him. The colour of someone’s eyes escapes him, the particularities of a face vanish before his eyes. In this way, the writer will not be able to depict features, paint a portrait, differentiate it, analyse it, find any resemblance or preference in it. If he is to describe a character, it will be to paint him like he would nature: dead, frozen, fossilized. Muscles will

lazarean literature

| 57

no longer move; eyes will be motionless, mildly crazed. The mouth will always be open, not to utter words but a scream. ‘Do not surrender’, says it all for the Lazarean hero. He will live in the anonymity, in the illegality even, of his feelings, and only in others will he find a profound sense of love, equilibrium, joy and fulfilment. He endlessly seeks an example, a model, and at the heart of this emotional disintegration in which he struggles, perhaps he is not so far removed from all those who transfer the responsibility for love’s success onto others. I am thinking of those countless brightly coloured magazines that project onto our world the shadows of famous couples and subject so many of our compatriots to an emotional dictatorship. Parasitic love is not just the product of concentration camps, but an effect of this godless universe where the ersatz becomes mixed up with the purest inventions of our hearts and spirituality. This indifferent world in which we live only exists in its own reflection, its echo, its image; eroticism itself has disappeared. Perspex has replaced the clearest of crystal, for we seek to hold an unbreakable world in our hands. Parasitic love is a mental epidemic which rapidly takes hold in us. We are living through a lassitude of epic proportions – newspaper articles remind us of this daily. We kill out of lassitude. We let others starve to death out of lassitude. We would have others love out of our own lassitude (think of all those agony columns, the repercussions of an actress’s divorce, the laughter of an audience when watching Devil in the Flesh, etc.). Parasitic love, that Lazarean phenomenon, is not a fear of love, like some might imagine, but nostalgia for Love in a love with no object, where the carnal is no longer linked to the supernatural, and in this dissociation anything might happen, save creation, which is just the fruits of disappointment. But the most serious effect of this parasitic love, and sometimes its cause, is the concentrationary hero’s potential temptation to lead a ‘double life’, the temptation to adopt another existence that oversees that of everyday life, sometimes overflowing into it so much that he ends up seeming like a faker, a shady and unscrupulous individual. Other than this parasitic love, the Lazarean character is perpetually at odds with his fellow humans, although he is able to involve himself intimately with things, to lose himself in an object, to make do with a mere reflection. He always falls short of or overshoots the situation he provokes. He can’t quite seem to find the appropriate measure or the right balance needed. Most of the time, his breath is quite taken away by the events he faces. Like a bird on its branch, he cannot stay still; listening distractedly to whoever might speak to him, he becomes the harsh judge of everything the other might say or, still more, will lose sight of him and experience his departure or absence, when in fact the other remains standing before him, talking to him. Sometimes he might even become obsessed with the desire to disorientate the being who attempts to enter into relationship with him, to lead him into temptation; this fatal mania is perhaps reminiscent of the victim–perpetrator relationship. But why is the Lazarean hero incapable of entering into a story? Everything becomes paralysed around his person. He remains motionless and is quickly thrown into a panic when forced to take any kind of action, to make the first move, to em-

58 | jean cayrol

bark on an adventure – he goes to pieces. There is no story in Lazarean literature, no drive, no plot. The characters advance unsteadily, sometimes lying low like creatures in the jungle, sometimes dying from the desire to be found, understood, loved. The hero in fiction such as this never sits down, never stops, only ever experiencing outbursts of passion without following their progression, their rhythm; he is reckless, rushed, carried away by a multiplicity of episodes, by a scattering of action, by a sort of corruption of reality. Near him, it is impossible to breathe; it is difficult to stay composed in the face of his breathless movements. And we want to scream at him, ‘Take a little rest, no one is forcing you to be everywhere at once, to sample all destinies on offer, to become so enraged by solitude and love, to pay for others, to deprive yourself so of your human condition’. But already, he is far off. He walks this road with his head down, tense, like a condemned man with only a few paces more to live. He will not listen to you, this terrified conqueror, bent under the excessive weight of his relics. We quickly lose sight of him, for we are yet to understand the obscure and enigmatic morals that he blindly obeys. It is easy, therefore, to deplore the Lazarean hero for not knowing how to conduct himself when with others, even those he has loved and chosen. Human beings, landscapes appear ‘hazy’ like photographic plates; he has nevertheless done all he can to capture them fully, but all he manages to retain is a vague impression of them; he knows not how to ‘frame’ them, he is unable to catch them in a good light. It is always at dusk, as night approaches, that it suddenly occurs to him to pin down their traits. His hand trembles before their faces; doubt creeps in, mistrust. He has unlearned how to judge his fellow man, to see clearly what is in his heart; he is capable of suspecting anyone of dishonest intentions, of dark schemes or tricks. Nothing is simple, to his mind. He has the gift of complication, calculation, difficulties. He sees the person he talks to as an enemy to be duped, a perpetrator to be discovered; the world no longer has a human face. Since returning, thinks the deportee, who has managed to recover his own face, who has managed to get back inside his own features, who has not undergone ‘facial surgery’? Do we ever know who we are sitting next to? The pasts are blurred; one is forced to fight through faces as through a crowd. Human disfigurement has been taken to extremes and it falls to us to recognize its corpses. We belong to the great era of Identification. When a concentrationary character introduces himself to another with all due courtesy, the following phenomenon takes place, of which Hitler himself was the prime example. Every being that appears before his eyes is at the same time the whole of humanity, with all its metamorphoses and public masks. All that can be seen in a face is the approach of death. The Lazarean character will always see a crowd, even in the simplest of faces. It is as though the magic art of depersonalization appears, deploying all its tricks and showiness; a face is endlessly replicated in the gaze of the concentrationary character. Since his reflexes have been annihilated, he cannot choose a face’s moment; its transformation is incessant and illogical.

lazarean literature

| 59

Perhaps, subconsciously, he is afraid of defiling or contaminating the Other. His own purification is carried in his memories of the Camp; he is like a depository for what one might call a ‘Lustral Camp’, and is able to return to its spring and dive in, persuaded as he is that there is innocence to be found in this virginal suffering. It can be noted that in this world I am attempting to describe, the face of Christ does not appear; the Lazarean only possesses the Camp’s pain, this pain that veils him in ambiguity and shrouds him in equivocation. Perhaps this is to do with a kind of monstrous arrogance, like that of Holy Saturday. The Christian who might feature in fiction of this kind will always be one who is not able to see his passion to the end, who has descended before the final hour. The deportee has returned, though he seemed condemned. Why has he returned? Why was he chosen to return? What is the meaning of the death of others? Why has he been left with the cursed taste of agony in his mouth, only to be suddenly removed from his passion? Thus, any concentrationary literature is simply the illustration of Holy Saturday, of the day when, like out of tune instruments following the passing of the Lord, men can but despair at the eradication of their cross. Equally, every so-called Lazarean work will contain semblances of signs, and likenesses of wonders, something that will completely lead astray any unsuspecting reader, and leave him ‘wavering’, faced with a book at once too subtle and too exasperated. The writer skims ideas, like a bird skimming the surface of a river. Dizzy, he cannot concentrate. Concentrationary literature will give this unpleasant impression of breathlessness, where all incidents, dramatic events or other happenings do not fully enter into the reality of life, but pass by like a light breeze, a gust of wind, leaving mere fleeting traces that are misunderstood and difficult to retain. These traces still remain unfathomable to us. In any Lazarean creation, we are therefore faced with both the impenetrability of human beings, who evolve in this endlessly doubled world, and with the incommunicability between speakers, leading to an overuse of monologue and a pursuit of pithy sentences or biblical inscriptions. The hero dislikes answers to his questions; for him, the questions suffice, he wants his inquiry to be left in suspense. He is not afraid of silence, and at times will find certain satisfaction in the discomfort of the Other. Since at one time he was deprived of all words, he is unaccustomed to the lips’ wonderful movements, to warm words, to verbs made flesh. A Lazarean writer’s dialogue will either be oversimplified, or rich, embellished, poetic. He will choose the most succulent of words, and precious, simple images. Overall, he seeks not to express actions or emotions realistically, but to paint an aura around such actions or emotions, to give them unimaginable lustre and resonance, as if prolonging the tinkling of crystal glasses out of pure pleasure. The character described in this way will come across as a terrible dilettante, a bored amateur, an aesthete who, in any given situation will suddenly turn his head to listen to birdsong or the sound of wind in the trees. In this way, he believes he can put off the moment when he will have to choose or commit himself. He dawdles along, waiting, although

60 | jean cayrol

the danger may be imminent. He takes up the same position as a slave before his master, who, in a weak voice, sings the master’s favourite tunes to pacify and calm him. He will become a victim of charm, if I may put it that way. This literature comes across as a literature of impediments. Each being lives in his own kingdom or prison, without any communication other than that suggested by the author – that of his own voice or his own actions. (The writer will never have enough of his own characters to be able to devote himself to the common cause of reincarnation.) No human being described in the text is able to reach his full spiritual development, as an ‘obstacle’ always arises in his way, an eternal difficulty, endlessly repeated. And so these humans join the ranks of heroes in novels such as Armance by Stendhal or Joko [sic] by Pougens, for example. They are unable to find fulfilment or resolution in the playing out of their destinies, as a result of the restraint and infernal embarrassment that destroys all spontaneity in their actions, perception and beliefs. I quote Madame de Malivert’s words in Armance: ‘Do you still love him in spite of this defect, from which he is the first one to suffer?’ And it is just this emotional problem that consistently torments the main character; one might whisper, along with Stendhal: ‘Your greatest crime is keeping your distance from us.’ Is this not the key phrase in this strange literature? But what could the new child of this Lazarean century have to say in response? We make the same admission as the Duchesse de Duras in Édouard: ‘Hardship had turned him into a stranger.’ We thus see the Lazarean hero’s intimate filiation with other sorrowful heroes of our literature who, for different reasons, are embarrassed to be alive and who utterly wear out their solitude, like a pair of old shoes. But here, the pain goes even deeper, as the concentrationary hero is not ‘degenerate’ like Octave de Malivert; he is, on the contrary, the first of a new race whose numerous specimens we continue to discover, even in our own homes. Almost all of us are subject to this Lazarean universe in all its forms. We are devoured by a fire that we didn’t light. The Lazarean character, who knows not how to behave in the face of love or friendship, and who will even go so far as to evade his own happiness and healing, will be capable of unexpected furies and sudden outbursts of anger. He inflates his voice and words, whilst inside feeling utterly weak and fragile. He cannot maintain this anger for very long, however; he soon becomes overcome by it. Despite the rage he feels in trying to measure up to the situation, in trying not to appear to be lowering himself (he wants to show that he has relearned everything), he will only feel ‘lightning bolts’ of hatred. This state of exultation will not last long; soon he is ready to submit, to admit his mistake. He is like a drug addict, attempting to impose himself when all the while his weakness and ignominy grow stronger. And yet, how well he knows fear, fear not just of noise, movements or shadows, but of the whole world all at once. He is steeped in fear, and it is due to this fear that descriptions of landscape will play such an important role – open, huge landscapes, where footprints are lost, and hiding places are many. Descriptions of houses will always be suffocat-

lazarean literature

| 61

ing; no dwelling will find favour in the eyes of the concentrationary writer; these will be houses full of surprises, traps, hostility. Doors will become the stuff of nightmares; the haunting opening of doors will be taken to its height. The only things he will revere and respect will be forests, horizons, stretches of water, in a word, the ‘indefinable’ aspects of a landscape. For the Lazarean hero has a phobia of resemblance; he cannot stand anything unexpected in a landscape, or any sense of discord or riddle, so to speak. Above all other things, he fears being taken for someone else, for to resemble something is to imitate it, and he knows how surprisingly well he can mimic things, with his well-developed faculty for ‘aping’ others, caricaturing and thus destroying them. This does not stem from perversion but is a product of both his powers of doubling [dédoublement] and simultaneously his permanent state of disembodiment. Overall, the Lazarean hero is never where he seems. He must make enormous efforts to think he is there and not elsewhere, for he has lived in a world located nowhere whose borders are undefined, for they are the borders of death. He is ever suspicious of the place where he has just arrived. At times, he will be able to slowly regain his sense of place by a prodigious effort of memory; this is why diffuse light seems to surround his person, like a kind of halo, making him seem further away than he really is. The reality around him becomes iridescent. Reality is not simple for him; he must think about it before seeing it; perhaps this comes from the bizarre intimacy between concentrationary characters of ‘every kind’ and objects. Indeed, the things that form part of his fragile heritage to him possess a presence and exceptional intensity and rarity that sometimes even the living do not. A knife, for example, can have a childhood, a personality and an old age. He reveres it, gives it bread to cut, and in this he almost entrusts it with life itself. A knife cuts just the right piece, brings it to the mouth, and is not oblivious to the drama of losing a single crumb of bread. Thus, the realm of objects will play an attentive and meticulous role in Lazarean literature. It will have its own passage of time, its own emotions, passions, and reticence, and it will sometimes function as an escape from solitude, an opening into the world of others, like ‘eyes’. The more the Lazarean character is blinded, the more this realm of objects sees for him and guards within it the glint and lost meaning of his fellow man’s world. The object next to a human being may prove more revealing and accessible than the being itself. Man can confess all that he would not otherwise say to the glass that he holds in his hand, or to the long-awaited apple he grips between his ‘pensive’ fingers. The universe of motionlessness in which he exists knows not the passage of time; this is a typical image for Holy Saturday, as on Friday enough has been lived through to suffice for all eternity. The Lazarean character only knows what time it is thanks to hearsay; he is not a man of the day or of the night, but of the dawn, the very light of purgatory. However, this ‘living thing’ cannot be spoken of as though he were simply a passive being, numbed by his abjection, spineless and dispossessed, for he is rich for those who can or have the time to draw near to him, to attract him towards the true light, and to hear his deepest secrets, where human ears can no longer go. In

62 | Jean Cayrol

all writing, even Lazarean writing, there is a sense of waiting, of pausing, but these days, nothing compares to that which is capable of keeping watch, defying sleep, and hoping against hope. The sound of the radio drowns out that of the opening door. ‘“No, I didn’t hear anything”, says the man of the house’. But everyone is worried; the footsteps of a thief are so quiet. A friend’s footsteps would be louder. The radio is turned down and silence returns; perhaps it is the Lazarean hero who approaches, so the radio is turned back up. Blaring out, it is the number one imitator, the all-new blaring tabernacle. This is a man who is also in desperate, unimaginable, hopeless need of love. He cannot go without love, whatever name one might choose to give it: commitment to a political party, surrender to religious faith, attraction to feminine love. This uprooted man, in the grips of the untiring indigence that haunts the world, can only live through others, and is very good at speaking for others who seek to deny their own agony. The Lazarean community is a community with its back against a wall, it is rash, insane; even one’s best friend cannot be trusted; in it, one’s father is a murderer; it is a community centred on objects, complicity, opposition. It relies on death to decide between its adversaries. In it, man becomes savage, formless, and all his works bear its marks, its scratches. It hurts to get too close; a book of Lazarean fiction cannot be held for very long; it is completely pierced through with thorns. Rest assured, I do not wish to subscribe to propagandist and heraldic literature in these pages, or subject you to more bedside reading. I stand for a literature of mercy that saves man, and I seek to trace an outline of this somewhat clandestine literature, which mingles with the real, randomly infiltrating disasters and upheavals, because it is literature that must take its place amidst others of its kind that bear witness to the greatest killing of souls of all time. It must find its special place in ‘God’s sweet pity’, in Bernanos’s words. This literature of denial, stagnation and reminiscence must not be condemned to neglect; we must not turn away from the intolerable things that in its fervour it seeks to represent, or from its awkwardly portrayed hopes. It is already here. And, at all costs, it must be revealed when necessary, gently and tenderly, for it bears all the weight of human misery that finds no meaning until it connects with the hearts and, if necessary, consciences of others. This interconnectedness is not so different from the Communion of Saints, where we find again the flesh of our flesh, and where the earth is accepted as it is, in both the concentrationary universe and the universe of joy.

Notes Translated by Katie Tidmarsh. Katie is a freelance translator and researcher. She is currently engaged in PhD research at the Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 on memory and transnational identities in contemporary literature from the Democratic Republic of Congo and its diaspora.  1. Pierre Chaplet, Häftling 43485 (Paris: Éditions Charlot, 1947).

Part II

Situating Cayrol’s Lazarean

CHAPTER 1

Lazarean Writing in Post-war France Patrick ffrench

In an essay from 1964 titled ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ (‘La Rature’), Roland Barthes wrote the following about the work of the writer Jean Cayrol: We know just where this work comes from: from the concentration camps. The proof of which is that Lazare parmi nous, a work which contains the first junction of the experience of the camps and literary reflection, contains in germ, with great exactitude, all of Cayrol’s subsequent work. Pour un romanesque lazaréen is a programme which is still being carried out today, in a virtually literal fashion; the best commentary on Muriel is Lazare. What must be suggested, if not explicated, is how such a work – whose germ is in a specific, dated history – is nonetheless entirely a literature of today. The first reason is perhaps that the concentrationary system is not dead: there appear in the world odd concentrationary impulses – insidious, deformed, familiar – cut off from their historical model but dispersed like a kind of style; Cayrol’s novels are the very passage from the concentrationary event to the concentrationary everyday; in them we rediscover today, twenty years after the camps, a certain form of human malaise, a certain quality of atrocity, of the grotesque, of the absurd, whose shock we receive in the presence of certain events, or worse still, in the presence of certain images of our time. The second reason is that Cayrol’s œuvre, from its beginning, has been immediately modern; all the literary techniques with which we credit today’s avant-garde, and singularly the New Novel, are to be found not only in Cayrol’s entire œuvre, but even, as a conscious programme, in Pour un romanesque lazaréen (a text which dates from 1950).1 If I have quoted Barthes’s ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ at length here it is because it offers in condensed form a remarkably clear version of the thesis I will pursue in this chapter: that between the late 1940s and the early 1960s it is possible to trace the

66 | patrick ffrench

outline of a Lazarean literature that emerges in the wake of the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, but that also extends backwards to the literature of the absurd of the early 1940s, around Albert Camus in particular, and forward, towards the Nouveau Roman of the late 1950s and beyond. The qualities of Lazarean writing which Barthes identifies – the absence of intrigue or plot, the disappearance of the traditional hero to the profit of an anonymous voice or look, the promotion of objects and of description, the reduction or impoverishment of affectivity and the ‘Ulyssean’ motif of movement across space – are specific to Cayrol’s novels, but extend beyond them to colour the post-war period as a whole. Cayrol would play a decisive role, moreover, in the development of Barthes’s critical approaches to literature and the paradigms underpinning post-war literary theory and practice; indeed Barthes’s first extensive study of any single contemporary writer focuses on Cayrol (‘The Novels of Jean Cayrol’, 1952). It is the contours of this mode or form of writing, as well as the formative elements of its emergence, that I want to trace in what follows, in order to redress the (ironic) erasure from critical memory of the figure of Cayrol and of the Lazarean mode in the post-war literary context in France. In addition to this historical and contextual argument, I will also suggest that Cayrol’s writing and the critical engagements with it prefigure some of the key emphases of more recent theoretical writing on the camps and on the concentrationary regime, notably in the dislocation of temporality and presence and the problematization of representation that they bring into play. These arguments will, I hope, contribute to a redrawing of the map of the post-war literary and theoretical context, and work to introduce some more productive mobility into the somewhat reified critical paradigms through which we approach it. The historical situation of Lazarean writing is not straightforward. On one level, the period at stake spans the twenty years after the Liberation. Yet the temporality of the Lazarean is paradoxical, as if the disturbance in relation to death that the figure of Lazarus provokes casts its shadow back before the event itself; it is not only life after the Liberation, post-1945, that permanently belongs to or is affected by the event of the camps, but also the world before the camps. The camps open up a breach in time such that both before and after, and the world in its entirety, are affected. They are affected, moreover, in a negative mode; because the event of the camps falls under the sway of what Barthes calls erasure, not a suppression, but a ‘major forgetting’ (oubli majeur), the effect or affect of the camps is felt as a displacement in relation to the time of the world, which nevertheless persists unaffected by the deportations and the absurd ‘other worlds’ of the camps.2 Lazarean literature does not comprise a direct representation of the experience of the camps, nor is it necessarily or fully conceivable as a literature of testimony. The consequence of the event is to have removed presence from itself, a withdrawal of writing from the institution of literature or the novel which instigates writing as an act, a return to the thickness of existence and to the contingency and liminal status of the human. The oft-cited opening proposition of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster is very pertinent here: ‘The disaster

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 67

ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’.3 The disaster is such that it does not occur as an event in the ‘normal’ run of things; the displacement in time that it provokes irradiates the world, especially as seen from the perspective of the one who has returned. This is the dominant feature of Lazarean literature as it emerges through the work of Cayrol and through the critical perspectives brought to bear by Barthes upon it. It is significant that in the passage cited above, Barthes proposes that ‘the best commentary on Muriel is Lazare’. His reference is to the 1963 film on the historical, social and psychological dynamics of a world after disaster, directed by Alain Resnais, Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, with a screenplay by Cayrol.4 This connection focuses attention on the temporality of the return, on the catastrophic disturbance of temporality provoked by this return, after the event.

The Currency of the Concentrationary From the paragraphs above, and in the quotation from ‘Cayrol and Erasure’, it may seem that the terms ‘concentrationary’ and ‘Lazarean’ are being used interchangeably. In the excerpts from ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ cited above, Barthes also erroneously renames Cayrol’s ‘Towards the Concentrationary Novel’ (‘Pour un romanesque concentrationnaire’) as ‘The Lazarean Novel’ (‘Le Romanesque lazaréen’).5 The two words do however draw from different sources and have a different semantic range. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman have, in the three previous volumes of this series, traced the development of the terms concentrationnaire and ‘concentrationary’ following the publication in 1946 of David Rousset’s The Concentrationary Universe (L’Univers concentrationnaire) and Hannah Arendt’s subsequent essay of 1948, ‘The Concentration Camps’. They have underlined the important distinction between the concentration camp and the extermination camp and insisted on the critical value of the term ‘concentrationary’, referring not only to the vast concentrationary system in operation in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, but also to the logic of the concentrationary which extended beyond the specific time and space of 1939 to 1945, a proposition especially important in the work of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.6 In this infection of the world by the logic and mechanics of the camp, Pollock and Silverman underline what was argued as the ‘inception and initiating actualization of a new political possibility in modern political life’.7 The notion of the concentrationary as a possibility, thus the potential for its repetition, also supports a further dimension and characteristic of the term, which extends to the discourses and modes of thought that, through a witnessing of the event and a promotion of vigilance with regard to its recurrence, defend against this possibility. Pollock and Silverman thus underline that the concentrationary also extends to an aesthetic, and they track this through Rousset’s The Concentrationary Universe and Rousset’s next book The Days of our Death (Les jours de notre mort), before moving on to address its presence and force in the film directed by Alain Resnais for which Cayrol wrote the commentary or voiceover, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard ).

68 | patrick ffrench

While Agamben’s analysis of the logic of the camp is, as Pollock and Silverman point out, in part grounded in a reading of the work of Primo Levi, Cayrol’s writing offers ‘another perspective’, oriented more towards aesthetics and poetics rather than juridical and political theory, and focused around the figure of Lazarus.8 While Agamben’s account focuses in particular on the figure of the Muselmann, in keeping with its prominence in Levi’s writing, Cayrol’s Lazarus proposes a resonant but problematically distinct response, which raises questions concerning survival, extremity, representability and redemptive transcendence. Specifically, the Lazarean motif orients the discussion towards the question of the return, and the effect of this return on the world to which the Lazarean subject, the survivor, returns. The motif emerges out of a similar context of critical attention to the camps and their legacies, but it also develops within Cayrol’s literary work, as a solution of a kind to the problems posed by this return. Yet the Lazarean motif does not belong to Cayrol alone, but emerges in tandem with the notion of the concentrationary in the critical context of the immediate post-war period. The Catholic humanist or ‘personalist’ review Esprit, founded in the 1930s by the French philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Mounier, would devote sustained attention to the concentrationary and to Rousset, with two separate dossiers in November 1947 and September 1949 respectively. The first of these dossiers was published alongside the last of three excerpts from Cayrol’s 1947 novel Someone is Speaking to You (On vous parle), which would be republished in book form in the same year alongside a second novel The First Days (Les premiers jours), under the collective title I Will Live the Love of Others ( Je vivrai l’amour des autres). The dossier is significant in pointing to a grouping of testimonies of the camps by survivors, including the two books by Rousset, Antelme’s The Human Race (L’Espèce humaine), Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat, Germaine Tillion’s ‘ethnography’ of Ravensbruck, and Cayrol’s work, mentioning specifically a ‘meditation’ in the theological review Dieu vivant (see later) but also ‘his work as a poet and novelist’ (‘son œuvre de poète et romancier’).9 The second Esprit dossier of September 1949 on the concentrationary is closely focused on literature. Titled ‘Literature of Derision or Literature of Resurrection’, it includes essays by Bernard d’Astorg (‘Locating a Literature of Derision’) and by Claude-Edmond Magny on François Mauriac; between these two we find Jean Cayrol’s essay ‘Towards a Concentrationary Novel’, which would comprise the second part of Lazarus Among Us, in which Cayrol first consecrates the Lazarus motif, emphasizing the question of the return and of the persistence of the perspective of the survivor, of the one who had come face to face with death, alongside the continuing time of the ‘normal’ world. The figure of Lazarus already had a currency, however, in relation to the concentrationary; Rousset had intended to give a third book the title Lazarus Resuscitated (Lazare ressuscité ), but his next book, on the administrative bureaucracy of the concentrationary regime, would in fact be titled The Clown Who Did Not Laugh (Le pitre qui ne rit pas). In another indication of the wider currency of the figure of Lazarus in relation to the concentrationary, Magny contributed an

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 69

extensive essay on Antelme’s The Human Race to Esprit in February 1948 (thus a year and half before the appearance of Cayrol’s ‘Towards a Concentrationary Novel’), under the title ‘The Parable of Lazarus or the Rediscovery of Language’ (‘Le parabole de Lazare ou le langage retrouvé’).10 Magny begins the essay with a consideration of the difficulty of language and of communication that pertains to those who return: Lazarus has been miraculously brought back to life, but no one wants to question him, and he himself only has a limited desire to tell his story. . . . To speak is still to touch and be touched. And when one has learnt to keep one’s mouth shut for one, two, maybe three years, one becomes a little sceptical about the communicative powers of language. A while ago already, Maurice Blanchot, Brice Parain and Jean Paulhan threw doubt on these supposed powers of language, but only in the abstract; the experience of the camps does so in the most concrete way possible.11 Comparing the returned deportee to the figure of Lazarus, and pointing to the difficulty of ‘translating’ the experience for the liberating forces, Magny suggests the relevance of the work of contemporary writers, including Blanchot, on the question of communication. The figure of Lazarus is here linked to a scepticism with regard to language and the possibility of a straightforward communication, to the dimension of the negative and of the ‘limit experience’, theorized during the Occupation by Blanchot and Georges Bataille, author of Inner Experience. These dimensions will also feed into Barthes’s consideration of Lazarean literature, but will be given a different inflection. It is significant, nevertheless, that Magny opens her consideration of the ‘literature of deportation’ with a reflection on the ‘absolute schism (‘clivage absolu’) created between human beings by “limit experiences”’, and that she does so via the figure of Lazarus.12 The notion of literature as a confrontation with death and as a form of witnessing of that confrontation widens the scope of the figure of Lazarus beyond the specific context of the New Testament and of resurrection, on which it might nevertheless be instructive to focus at this point. Lazarus has died four days before Jesus comes to the town of Bethany where he is entombed.13 His sisters Martha and Mary are waiting outside the tomb; against the objections of Mary, who says that he has been dead for four days and smells bad already, Jesus orders Lazarus to come out of the tomb, which he promptly does. Jesus tells him to take off his bandages and leave. At that point Lazarus disappears from the story. The gospel narrative evidently places the emphasis on the resurrection itself, on the act and power of Christ, and there is no interest in the experience, such as it is, of Lazarus himself. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the corpse – Lazarus smells already, and is wrapped in a winding sheet – installs within the narrative the fact of death. The figure of Lazarus is in other words ambivalent – one ‘side’ pointing to resurrection and the ‘return’, and the other to death and the space of death that Lazarus has inhabited. It is this interregnum, this parenthesis of death that the Lazarean motif opens up and which, I will argue, is the prominent focus of the deployment of the

70 | patrick ffrench

figure by Barthes and Cayrol. It also allows us to connect Cayrol’s use of the figure with its incidence in the work of Blanchot. In Blanchot’s 1948 essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’), an extensive meditation on the possibility of literature, we read the following: The language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature. Literature generally calls it existence; it wants the cat as it exists, the pebble taking the side of things [dans son parti pris de chose], not man but the pebble, and in this pebble what man rejects by saying it, what is the foundation of speech and what speech excludes in speaking, the abyss, Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into daylight, the one who already smells bad, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to life.14 In keeping with other references to the figure of Lazarus in his work, Blanchot is exploring the desire that literature embodies to recuperate existence in its materiality, in its thereness, that which language confines to nonexistence by the act of naming.15 He does this via a distinction between two ‘sides’ of Lazarus, the Lazarus of the tomb, the cadaver, and Lazarus rendered back to the light, Lazarus resuscitated. Blanchot’s use of the figure of Lazarus here may well have fed into Magny’s article, and Cayrol’s more substantial recuperation of the term. On the other hand, while he was familiar with the work of Bataille (as a reference in Lazarus Among Us indicates), Cayrol was probably not familiar with the character of Lazare, ostensibly modelled on the French philosopher, radical socialist and theological writer Simone Weil, in Bataille’s novel The Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel ), which, despite having been written in 1935, was not published until 1957. In the novel, Bataille’s narrator Troppman associates Lazare with death and with the corpse, referring to her as a ‘bird of ill-omen’ (‘oiseau de malheur’), to her ‘macabre appearance’ (‘aspect macabre’), the ‘almost cadaverous hue of her skin’ (‘le teint de la peau un peu cadavérique’), and to ‘a contract she might have drawn up with death’ (‘un contrat qu’elle aurait accordé à la mort’).16 Both Blanchot and Bataille’s use of the Lazarus figure establish a precedent (although not a chronologically straightforward one) for the use of the figure to refer to a kind of living death, a life beyond death, rather than a resuscitated life. This duality will be a crucial element of Lazarean art as Cayrol and Barthes propose it.

The Paroxysm of the Cross A further pretext in Cayrol’s own work for the figure of Lazarus, in which the concentrationary is explicitly at stake, can be found in a ‘meditation’ he wrote as a ‘liminary’ text for the theology review Dieu vivant. In keeping with the orientation of the review, it is an explicitly Christian account of the experience that argues, seemingly against Rousset, that the only possible approach to the camps is one of faith, and

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 71

suggests that, irrespective of their fate, its victims were saved if they believed that Christ died for their sins.17 Cayrol engages with Rousset’s The Concentrationary Universe but also with the novel The Weapons of the Night (Les armes de la nuit) by the celebrated Resistance novelist Vercors, author of The Silence of the Sea (Le silence de la mer).18 He recognizes the value of Rousset’s text, which for him seems to go beyond so many ‘confused testimonies’ (‘témoignages confus’) to finally bring clarity to the subject, but hesitates in relation to Rousset’s style, which he refers to as ‘dechristianized’ (‘déchristianisé’) or as a ‘disincarnation’ (‘une désincarnation’) equivalent to the ‘language of the executioners’ (‘le langage des bourreaux’) itself.19 Rousset’s style, Cayrol proposes, also makes us see through the eyes of the executioners, and disallows any sense of solidarity with the victims. Rousset’s account thus appears to Cayrol as redundant, because the ‘anonymization’ of death by the ‘concentrationary apparatus’ (‘outillage concentrationnaire’) has already been surpassed by the atomic bomb, and, Cayrol adds, because the operation put into effect in the Nazi camps failed.20 The operation failed, Cayrol says, because there were survivors, but more significantly because the look of the first victim already escaped the control of the executioners. It escaped it because it was transfigured by the joy of suffering: The machine was invalidated from its first victim; its cogs were misaligned from the first look of the first dying man, that look which never belonged to the executioner; like in the killing machine of Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’, there too was the ‘transfiguration of the tortured face’, and in any face ‘purified so strangely by filth’ as Catherine of Siena says, it was a Joy which affected the executioner himself because man puts an end to darkness with a deeper darkness.21 The meaning is clear: the victims of the camps were redeemed by joy in the depths of their pain. The resonances with the thought and work of Georges Bataille are very strong here, but while Bataille considers the extremities of pain to be a form of erotic ecstasy, the meaning for Cayrol is explicitly Christian. Both Rousset’s and Vercors’s texts provoked, he proposes, the same ‘obscuring of the real face of the camps’ (‘obscurcissement du vrai visage des Camps’), because they did not acknowledge that the victim cannot lose his human quality, ‘since he was endlessly saved by the Cross’ (‘puisqu’il fut sans cesse sauvé par la Croix’).22 Cayrol’s approach at this point is exclusively and militantly Christian, as he comments: Nothing can be understood of the testimonies of the survivors of the Camps unless this testimony is that of the Cross, unless one sees the Camps as the most extreme attempt at a defense and illustration of the Cross, the cross pushed to the paroxysm of the Cross, because it has not finished surprising us.23 The concentrationary universe is not an absurd universe, Cayrol says, because its ‘explanation’ lies in the Agony of Jesus. It is open to everyone and everyone must live

72 | patrick ffrench

it and survive it, the only way of doing this being via the ‘theatre’ of the Cross: ‘only an “ordinary” Christian can disarm the Camps like an unexploded bomb without risk of danger’.24 Cayrol insists that, Rousset’s and Vercors’s works notwithstanding, the suffering of the camps is the suffering of Christ, and we can extinguish the flames of the ovens ‘in the flames of Charity alone’.25 Significantly, Cayrol writes that ‘the notion of the neighbour disappears in this continual defiguration’; one is not saved by community, by fellow-feeling, but only by Christ.26 It must be said that the quite explicit militant Christianity of Cayrol’s consideration of the concentrationary in this text is lacking in his later writing; if there is a Lazarean ethos here, the stress is firmly on the ‘side’ of resuscitation and salvation. The world of Cayrol’s novels, and of Lazarean writing as theorized by Barthes, is far less certain, far less oriented towards transcendence; the other side of Lazarus predominates.

Lazarus Among Us With Lazarus Among Us, Cayrol shifts terrain quite markedly from the militant Christianity of the Dieu vivant text, both in terms of the overall tenor of the essay and the focus of its concerns; we move from the camps themselves to their legacy, and the post-concentrationary world. In the preface, added in 1950, Cayrol argues that the republication of the two articles for a wider readership is justified despite the distance between the ‘frivolity’ of the modern world and what he calls the ‘Lazarean postulate’. He thus posits the recurrent motif of the parallel coexistence of two worlds. He adds that both articles sought to explain how, ‘in a universe destined for failure and negation’ (‘dans un univers voué à l’échec et à négation’) the ‘supernatural defences’ (‘défenses surnaturelles’) of man could have come into play.27 The Lazarean postulate, one can infer, concerns the resistance and the persistence of the fundamental, or ‘zero degree’ of human existence, the persistence of a ‘supernatural’ resistance of the basic human fact in a context that is entirely oriented towards its destruction and negation. The key resource against the negating force of the concentrationary regime is thus otherworldly, and as we will see later, a quasi-surreal refusal of the real and affirmation of an elsewhere; an affirmation, in other words, of the poetic. But the republication of the essay is also vital, Cayrol argues, because the ‘secret evil’ (‘mal secret’) of the camps is now a fact of our world.28 It is a question of bearing witness to a reality in which life is ‘preyed upon’ (‘aux abois’), in which the human profile no longer resembles itself, an echo of the motif we noted earlier of a difference introduced at the heart of the human, an uncanny difference or deformation.29 This other world into which we have been introduced is not simply an event in the past; it affects the future and infects it with an odour of death: ‘All that is left of our tomorrows is the stench of the abattoir. We are the corpses, lest we forget’.30 Cayrol marks here the cadaverous dimension of the figure of Lazare, the temporality of death or of the living corpse that henceforth coexists alongside the present.

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 73

Despite its recurrence intermittently throughout Lazarus Among Us, Cayrol’s Christianity is in some sense compromised, tainted; because the man who returns from the camps, Lazarus resuscitated, remains a deathly figure, a cadaver; the world after the camps is one that must exist in the knowledge of this corruption of the human fact. Even though the vigilance of conscience can ‘save’ the contemporary world and the future world from catastrophe, the scars (‘stigmates’) will remain on the body, just as Christ’s wounds continue to bleed. There is an ambivalence here – the possibility of dreams and of resistance in the concentrationary world is evidence of the resilience of the human soul, yet man has emerged changed by the camps; it is necessary to show how, and to study the ‘mysterious corruption of our world by this concentrationary or Lazarean element’.31 Despite its immortality and its resistance, Cayrol’s human soul is compromised and affected, ‘stricken in the very depths of his soul’ (‘dans les forces vives de son âme’).32 He exists and submits to a ‘Lazarean grip’ (‘étreinte lazaréenne’), thus the kind of death in life existence that the experience has left him with; his only strength, Cayrol proposes, is his weakness: ‘Only in his sickness does he find his temerity, in his infirmity his audacity’.33 The first chapter of Lazarus Among Us, on concentrationary dreams, opens with an epigraph from Baudelaire’s prose poem, ‘Invitation to the Voyage’: ‘As for me, I have found my black tulip, I have found my blue dahlia!,’ suggesting the crucial importance of the poetic dimension of existence in the camps, the existential resource of the capacity to imagine an elsewhere, a utopic dreamland like the one conjured in the poem.34 For Cayrol, the irreality of dreams was the best defence against ‘the human reality he was experiencing in its purest form’ (‘la réalite humaine à l’état pur’), the pressure of a potentially lethal everyday reality.35 Dreams were a mode of flight before an unacceptable existence, but also a connection to a former life and a guarantee of the future. They bore witness to the fact that man could overcome what was killing him: These iridescent night time perspectives were superimposed on his everyday existence and gave him the possibility of being ‘elsewhere’, to be with others without being like others; they helped him to totally refuse daytime’s horrible grip, and provided him with different ‘intonations’.36 Dreams were not simply a nightly escape from the realities of the day, but an other world that enabled the prisoner to inflect his everyday experience differently, to resist the imposition of reality ‘in the pure state’; it is this poetic capacity that, in Cayrol’s account, assures existential survival. Each minute had its ‘double’ in a dream life; each instant had another side. Further on in his preface, however, Cayrol adds a subtle but profound aspect to the recourse to dreams as a flight from an unacceptable reality, because, in relation to a reality that was itself absurd, the dream world functions as a kind of reminder, or guarantee, of the reality outside the camp. Cayrol describes the concentrationary reality as having a ‘very “expressionist” setting’ (‘une mise en scene très “expressioniste”’)

74 | patrick ffrench

and a ‘cataleptic demeanour’ (‘tournure cataleptique’).37 The experience is likened to ‘a kind of concentrationary hypnosis’ (‘une sort d’hypnose concentrationnaire’), as a deliberately managed hallucination or disengagement, a ‘disorientation cleverly maintained’ (‘un dépaysement savament entretenu’), a ‘dark pantomime’ (‘une féerie noire’).38 Dreams paradoxically became a more reliable reality, a kind of resource. The disengagement of the present from itself becomes a condition of existential survival; it is foregrounded in Cayrol’s remark that ‘[t]he prisoner was never there when he was being beaten’, where the poetic and the existential coincide in the same displacement of presence.39 This reversal – in which dreams become a link to the real – has a crucial effect on the image of the world beyond the camps, which itself starts to become oneiric and utopic, idealized: Little by little, the image of the real world became transfigured, embellished, became the Ideal Image of tomorrow’s world, a meticulously prefabricated image, which, at the moment of return would cave in too brutally for some to cope with and would lead them to seek out, in suicide, the ideal image of the heavenly hereafter.40 The return to the real world could thus be ‘falsified’ or ‘perverted’ by the recurrent construction of the idealized other reality. The Lazarean subject, as Cayrol sketches his psyche here, lives between two universes, and is perpetually ‘feeling as though we were wavering, in a state of mental vagrancy and rootlessness’.41 Cayrol begins the second part of Lazarus Among Us, the key programmatic essay ‘Pour un romanesque concentrationnaire’, with the bold statement ‘There is nothing to explain’.42 His approach will not be to retell the story, but to diagnose the continuation of the concentrationary in other modes in the present, to bring to light what he calls the ‘Elusive Camp’ (‘cet Insaissisable Camp’).43 The concentrationary is not, for Cayrol, an event in the past, but a virtual factor in the present. He underlines this through the image of the ‘smell’ of the concentrationary, which he says is getting stronger: ‘more than ever, it reeks of the concentrationary’ (‘ça sent plus fort que jamais le concentrationnaire’), foregrounding the cadaverous dimension of the Lazarean.44 Using the powerful underlying metaphor of a spasmodic condition, he proposes that the extra-concentrationary world is beginning to take on the mannerisms and the reflexes of the world of the camps: ‘those who only know about the camps by hearsay are starting to suffer from the major tics of this universe’.45 The symptoms of the concentrationary are thus acute, and this sense of urgency is translated by Cayrol into a kind of resource for a decrepit literature: ‘Can it too be renewed by an intimate relationship with this demonic effervescence?’.46 This is a ‘concentrationary realism’ (‘réalisme concentrationnaire’); it is also part of the everyday.47 The concentrationary extends in unexpected incursions into contemporary reality. Cayrol asks therefore if one cannot envisage an art that is born directly from such a radical and profound catastrophe, and that has shaken the basis of conscious-

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 75

ness. He names this ‘a Lazarean Art’ (‘art lazaréen’).48 More specifically, a Lazarean literature, Cayrol contends, cannot continue to believe in Balzacian or Stendhalian modes of realism and psychology, but must confront the decay and the corpses of the concentrationary regime: ‘Today, we await conquering writers who are not ashamed to step over the dead bodies or the putrefaction’.49 Cayrol refers to the moment of Rousset’s and Antelme’s analyses of the ‘general physiognomy of German camps’ (‘la physionomie générale des camps allemands’), and to the generalized sense that, in relation to the camps, the time of museums and memories has come, but counters this with the assertion that the camps persist, across time.50 The persistence of the concentrationary and the condition of the survivors is going unnamed, unconscious. Time itself has been deported (‘un temps lui-même déporté’).51 The deportees have thus returned to a hostile, perverted environment, to ‘a life on the fringes’ (‘une vie en marge’).52 It is as a mode of response to this ‘post-concentrationary’ life that Lazarean literature is called for, where what is needed is a mode of writing in which ‘all events, even the most familiar, seem incomprehensible, reprehensible, revolting, irritating and so extremely opaque’.53 Cayrol calls for a literature to the measure of an incomprehensible, displaced universe, in which the returned deportee finds everything again, but nothing familiar, and a generalized sense of exile. Accordingly, he recognizes in Camus the ‘first historian and researcher’ (‘le premier historien et chercheur’) of this mode of writing.54 The stylistic armoury of Lazarean literature includes, in Cayrol’s account, the prominence of the fantastical, a situation in which ‘the wonderful or magical quality leads the real’ (‘le merveilleux ou le féerique conduit le réel’), and the recurrence of the motif of the double: ‘the dual reality of the Lazarean being’ (‘le dédoublement de l’être lazaréen’).55 There are strong implications as concerns narrative: ‘Nothing will ever be surprising anymore’, because ‘[e]ach creation is just as easily “done” as “undone” and in this way becomes unpredictable’.56 The Lazarean protagonist is essentially solitary, and lives a life as if in excess of death, or in the aftermath of a deformation of life: ‘Lazarean literature finds its basis in the solitude where a human will live a life of extremes’.57 He lacks sentimental or affective capacities and is obliged to live vicariously through the passions of others; he is ‘a castrated being’ (‘un être castré’) and is ‘fiercely ascetic’ (‘[d’un] ascétisme farouche’).58 This dedicates him to an obsessive focus on objects, but also to a kind of paralysis in relation to time; time does not flow, resulting in a lack of narrative sequentiality: ‘There is no story in Lazarean literature, no drive, no plot’.59 Cayrolian man (as Barthes will name him) experiences a certain flotation (‘flottement’) of being, a lack of groundedness or connection.60 At a fundamental level, the concentrationary determines a lack of presence, a displacement that affects temporality, consciousness and sociality: ‘the Lazarean hero is never where he seems’.61 Cayrol thus outlines in Lazarus Among Us the major elements of a literature of displacement and exile, in which the form of writing corresponds to a lived experience. This formal correspondence will also underpin Barthes’s response to the text and, slightly later, to Cayrol’s novels.

76 | patrick ffrench

The Absurd and the Concentrationary Barthes’s brief review of Lazarus Among Us appeared in the newspaper Combat in 1950. The context is significant: Combat was established during the Occupation as the organ of the Resistance movement of the same name and was strongly associated with its main editor, Albert Camus. Prior to 1950, Barthes had contributed several articles, the early sketches of what would become his first book Writing Degree Zero, as well as a series of articles in which he showed himself to be a staunch defender of Marxism but a critic of Soviet dogmatism. Already, in an essay of 1944 called ‘Reflections on the Style of The Outsider’, Barthes had pointed to the way in which Camus’s famous novel seemed to announce a new kind of style, a ‘style of silence and silence of style’ (‘style du silence et silence du style’), also described as ‘a white voice’ (‘une voix blanche’).62 But Barthes adds that ‘nothing is further from the logic of the absurd than to bear witness, even to the absurd’.63 The literature of testimony is set against the exigencies of form. The aesthetics of the absurd, the ‘concern for form’ predominate here over the demand to bear witness, yet this formal concern, far from being a rhetorical affectation, is the just expression of an existential state, ‘a style in accord with our irredeemable distress’.64 What is at stake is the endeavour to foreground the ‘responsibility of form’, to find a form of commitment at the level of the form of writing. The notion of a ‘zero degree’ of writing, of ‘a white or blank writing’ (‘une écriture blanche’) develops out of a concern with the formal dimensions of the absurd, with the tensions between the existential ‘witnessing’ of contingency and the formal aesthetics of writing, as distinct from the conventions of literature. However, in an article in Combat on grammar, in which the fundamental theses of Writing Degree Zero are outlined, Barthes voices the more radical proposal that Camus writes just like the nineteenth-century novelists Flaubert or Stendhal; no new form has emerged that has questioned the ‘myth’ of Classical French: ‘The problem for our contemporary writers is thus to cut writing off from its historical origins, that is, from its political origins’.65 To be of its time and to bear witness to its time, literature must disengage itself formally from the historical continuity of its language, turn away from political questions and from the concern to bear witness, and towards the issue of form. This is the ‘tragic’ or ‘utopian’ dimension that will be addressed in the last chapter of Writing Degree Zero. Barthes thus develops the argument for the autonomy of form; literature is ‘compromised’, because the instrument at its disposal, the language of Classical French, implies social exclusion. Despite a fleeting affirmation of Sartre’s attempt in the novel The Reprieve (Le Sursis) to break the monolingual voice of classical narrative, and of Sartre’s move towards theatre, Barthes presents a pessimistic prospect for literary fiction; it can only confront its historical situation by cutting itself off from its origins and thus from any direct relation to politics. In this light, we can infer, a ‘concentrationary’ literature, whose aim was to bear witness, could only be a similarly ‘compromised’ expression. A concentrationary art on these terms could only be one which strove to be commensurate to the lived experience of

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 77

the concentrationary event through its form. This conjunction of the formal and the existential is fundamental to the critical ethos of Lazarean literature. These concerns inform Barthes’s short summary of Lazarus Among Us. Despite its brevity, Barthes’s text allows us to establish some of the key critical emphases of his approach to Cayrol and to the Lazarean. Through its title, ‘An Extension of the Literature of the Absurd’ (‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’), Barthes positions Cayrol’s essay in continuity with Camus’s writing, emphasizing the formal conditions of the texts in question and picking up on the concerns he had elaborated in the earlier essay on Camus. Cayrol’s first chapter, for example, suggests to Barthes an equivalence between poetry and the ‘elsewhere’ conjured by the dreams of the deportees. However, he is at pains to distinguish this form or mode from literature as such, marking Cayrol’s writing out as distinct from that compromised institution, and postulating that, in the lived experience of the camps, Cayrol reaches a poetic dimension distinct from conventional narrative: ‘This Elsewhere of concentrationary dreams is exactly of the same kind as the poetic, and this allows us to measure the extent to which poetry differs from literature’.66 While Cayrol’s essay would provoke other critical responses, including a brief review by Maurice Blanchot (the first reference to the camps in his work), the encounter with Cayrol’s writing, and with Cayrol himself, will be particularly crucial for Barthes, who met Cayrol through the intermediary of Esprit’s editor Albert Béguin in 1951.67 This encounter, contemporaneous with the composition of Writing Degree Zero, provides Barthes’s theorization of literature with a strong and distinctive impetus, which he develops in his first extensive critical essay on any contemporary writer, ‘Jean Cayrol and his Novels’, published in Esprit in 1952.

The Lazarean Novel Barthes opens his consideration of Cayrol’s novels with the question of duration, and a focus on those writers ‘who conceive of the human drama uniquely in terms of duration’.68 The notion of a novel of ‘pure duration’, of which the significance is nothing other than the existential dimension of this duration, is close to the absurdity Barthes had discussed previously; it points towards a writing that has withdrawn from a concern for the intrigue or for the dramatic and turned towards the question of survival or, as Barthes suggests, of continuity. The ‘degree zero’ here is not specifically of style, but of the event, a degree zero of temporality in which the writing presents a persistence of the human outside any specific story or event: ‘Cayrolian continuity is not the result of plot, in the usual sense of the word; it is a continuity of episodes, encounters, descriptions, in which the event is brought to a kind of zero state, whose thinness is disconcerting’.69 Paradoxically, however, this pure duration of survival is also one of birth, and it is perhaps in this contradiction between survival and birth that the Lazarean mode can be partially identified, in the paradox of a time outside

78 | patrick ffrench

history that is nevertheless completely determined by it. The ‘cataclysm’ of the camps intervenes to separate history from itself, making for a ‘doubling’ of time: In an infinitely withdrawn interior time, pushed back by some unnamed cataclysm – like the Camps, perhaps – before the human, there is a progressive institution of a world that is already instituted in inhuman foundations (objects).70 The post-concentrationary or post-cataclysmic time persists alongside the anterior time of objects and of others, but this prehistory is radically severed from the present. This disconnection means that Cayrol’s protagonist begins in a state of ‘unimaginable impoverishment’ (‘dénouement inimaginable’) and moves towards a human state, towards ‘the time of the first man’ (‘le temps du premier homme’).71 Barthes insists on the humanist dimension of Cayrol’s enterprise – ‘there is a Cayrolian man’ (‘il y a un homme cayrolien’) – but, he adds, nothing universal is assumed: ‘man is always thought in the singular’ (‘l’homme est sans cesse pensé au singulier’).72 The duration of the novel is formed ‘on the basis of a single human body’ (‘à partir d’un seul corps humain’), or ‘the biological time of the narrator alone’ (‘le seul temps biologique du narrateur’).73 This is not, then, a universalizing humanism that assumes a set of values as fundamental, but a humanism for which the claim to humanity is a struggle, a condition to be attained rather than assumed, a humanism in which the human is a capacity to be won through connections to others. It is a humanism of the first man, of those for whom the status of humanity is at stake, much as it is in Robert Antelme’s concentrationary essay L’Espèce humaine.74 In keeping with some of Barthes’s later emphases about contemporary writing, there is a phenomenological quality to Cayrol’s novel, because the text is embedded in ‘the thickness of flesh’ (‘l’épaisseur d’une chair’), the bodily duration of the narrator, and signals this as ‘the introduction of the internal body into Literature’ (‘avènement du corps intérieur dans la Littérature’), signalling a new relation between man and the world.75 This phenomenological tendency is also sustained by the radical separation from the past: ‘the flesh swiftly deprives man of his past and keeps him in a purely biological time, without previous History’.76 The immersion of and in the flesh of Cayrolian man, and the schism of the historical past are coexistent: It is fundamentally because Cayrolian man has a body and feels it to exist that his novelistic itinerary, even though it leads him from birth to birth, can only start from a being already conceived, brought out of the darkness in immense weakness, and yet already armed with a human quality. The essential given of the Cayrolian novel imposes on History a permanent withdrawal.77 The expression ‘brought out of the darkness in immense weakness’ is suggestive here. It is as if this weakness itself is the root cause of a need for ‘biological time’ (perhaps a parallel to the notion of ‘bare life’ which Agamben will develop), and the fore-

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 79

grounding of the experience of the flesh. The withdrawal of the historical past is thus coextensive, both cause and effect, of the restriction to the present of Cayrolian man, itself a result of the cataclysm named earlier. History is present only as the existential duration of the narrator’s experience. If the prominent features of the novel as Barthes outlines it here include the phenomenological, the withdrawal of history, the restriction to ‘biological time’, these qualities link Cayrol’s novels directly to the event of the cataclysm and the Lazarean quality of survival – ‘the Cayrolian drama lies in man’s survival of the withdrawal of his past’.78

Objects and Space in the Lazarean Novel A key element of Lazarean writing, as it is programmed by Barthes in this essay, bears upon Cayrol’s attention to objects in I Will Live the Love of Others. This relates to a keen interest on Barthes’s part; the essay on Cayrol has a significant relation to two other pieces, both in the collection Critical Essays: the essay ‘The Object World’ (‘Le monde-objet’) on Dutch still-life painting (1953), and ‘Objective Literature’ (‘Littérature objective’) (1954), Barthes’s first text on the prominent Nouveau Romancier (New Novelist) Alain Robbe-Grillet. Barthes’s Mythologies, in 1957, would also extend this attention to contemporary consumer objects, to their significations and their reifications. Cayrol’s essays afford Barthes the first occasion to explore the literature of objects, a direction already announced in Lazarus Among Us: in the era of the concentrationary, everyday objects take on a particularly acute significance. Barthes describes how, at least at the beginning, Cayrol describes a world constituted of objects. These are everyday objects: ‘fabricated things, of modest usage, a knife, a cigarette, a sandwich, espadrilles, a boiled egg, some vanilla, an apple, useful and daily accessories, the attributes of an already completely formed society’.79 The narrator/protagonist lives without a secure relation to society or to humanity; his social capacities have been lost and the only thing that remains is the encounter with everyday objects, things that in spite of their minor status have nevertheless passed through the hands of other men.80 Barthes observes that this is not a ‘poetic’ exercise that seeks to penetrate the object the better to attain its essence or its materiality, but a prosaic, novelistic approach that ‘rubs against’ (‘frôle’) objects.81 Cayrolian objects are familiar and available (‘disponibles’); they offer themselves to sight and to the hand, the first sign of a charity with which Cayrol impregnates the universe. These everyday objects offer to the narrator, who otherwise lacks capacities and connections, the basis of a possible humanity: ‘these humble, available, consumable and familiar objects . . . sketch out the outlines of a sociology, a frequenting, a jostling fellowship and a human complicity’.82 The availability and complicity of these everyday objects imply what might be called a friendship of objects, not only because they are near to hand, but also because they bear the trace of a human contact, and thus witness a human proximity (a ‘jostling’) and a connection. Objects are a refuge, the basis of a first society.

80 | patrick ffrench

The idea of having to start again, from objects themselves, to construct a humanity, a sociality, but also a literature (Barthes describes Cayrol’s writing as ‘a literature in a nascent state’ (‘une littérature à l’état naissant’) or a ‘pre-novelistic’ writing (‘préroman’)) reveals the breach in history.83 The narrator is severed from the time before the catastrophe, but has the chance for a form of redemption through objects, ‘an institution of man in a world already instituted in its inhuman foundations (objects)’.84 The persistence of objects, of a non-human stratae or foundation, is what makes a movement back to the world possible; the world of before persists somehow in everyday objects, as if in their reified form. Strictly speaking then, the institution of man in the novel is not a birth but a recuperation or a recovery. By the same token, it is not a question of remembering: Cayrol’s narrator has no real memory of the time before; the cataclysm has effaced it. It is as if the memory of humanity and of sociality is in some sense resident in the everyday objects he finds available to him. History and the past have been made subject to a ‘permanent withdrawal’ (‘réserve permanente’) following a rupture or ‘a crack’ (‘une faille’).85 In this post-cataclysmic time, while everyday objects (Lazarean objects, so to speak) persist and with them the possibility of a world, the narrator can only engage in a superficial relation with them, with their surfaces. Any relation of appropriation is unavailable: ‘he starts from a sort of zero state which affects both time and space, and each time an object or a memory arises this gives him the meticulous and yet detached attention, the long palpation of matter so foreign to true proprietors’.86 Cayrol’s ‘degree zero’, initiated by the cataclysmic rupture with the past, is a non-proprietorial engagement, thus contrasting with the ownership of objects that Barthes detects in Dutch still-life painting.87 Cayrolian objects offer themselves to touch, to a ‘palpation’, and in this sense they are neither objects of appropriation or of exchange. However, if Cayrol’s strategy as described by Barthes seems close to that of the poet Francis Ponge in Le parti-pris des choses (literally ‘taking the side of things’), as Barthes himself suggests in the essay on Robbe-Grillet, the zero state of the Cayrolian object is not oriented towards a poetic materialism as one might suppose it is for Ponge. Neither poetic nor commercial, Barthes suggests that Cayrol’s objects are ‘franciscan’, to the extent that they bear witness to a community of men (of humans) through their availability and familiarity.88 While they offer ‘a warmth’ (‘chaleur’) or ‘a refuge’ (‘un refuge’) and are ‘available’ (‘disponible’), these objects are not offered to an appropriative grasp or a penetrative hermeneutics; their mode of access is a description of their surfaces that are subject to a look (‘un regard’).89 The underpinning logic that Barthes outlines here, which moves from the suspension of certainties about the world through an obsessive attention to the surfaces of objects, is continuous across the literature of the absurd, that of the ‘impoverishment’ of the world (in Cayrol but also in the roughly contemporary novels of Samuel Beckett), that of Robbe-Grillet’s ‘objective literature’ (as Barthes sees it), as well as certain later texts by novelists of the early 1960s avant-garde group Tel Quel, Philippe Sollers and Jean-Louis Baudry, for example.90 But in Cayrol’s novels the focus on description is an immediate symptom of the Lazarean status of the

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 81

protagonist; Barthes argues that the ‘exhaustive descriptions’ (‘descriptions exhaustives’) correspond to a ‘primordial impoverishment’ (‘asthénie première’), a state of extreme fatigue and weakness.91 The fault lines in the suggestion here of an objective or ‘object-oriented’ literature become evident, however, when one considers, as Barthes does, that objects are only a stage in the development of Cayrolian man; they will recede into the background as the protagonist shifts his focus to the passions of others, as he learns a way back to human society through ‘love by procuration’ (‘l’amour par procuration’); ‘once Time is regained, Cayrolian man no longer needs to be detained by simple objects’.92 There is a provisional continuity between Cayrol, Beckett, Blanchot and Robbe-Grillet, but Cayrol is ‘on the way back’ to humanism, and the other writers mentioned move away from it. The continuity of the Lazarean novel across a swathe of post-war writing is also evident around the approach to space. Barthes develops an innovative critical conceptualization of space in the novel; in Classical and Romantic literature, and aesthetics more generally, the subject stands outside space and observes it. In modern space (Barthes refers to Kafka and Cayrol) the subject is ‘right up against’ (‘dressé à même’) things.93 So, although there is what Barthes calls ‘a Chardin side to Cayrol’s art’ (‘[un] côté Chardin dans l’art de Cayrol’), meaning a happy, triumphant submission of objects to the painter’s look, and a ‘happiness’ (‘bonheur’) of the material world as offered to and by the painter, objects are still a source of potential terror.94 Cayrol’s space is ‘an abnormal space’ (‘un espace anormal’), in which objects, distanced in classical space, are ‘too near to man not to provoke terror’ (‘trop près de l’homme pour ne pas contenir une terreur’). Cayrol’s cosmogony thus remains open to the contingencies of existence, to the power of the negative. Referring again to Kafka (to Metamorphosis specifically), Barthes finds in Cayrol’s novels ‘a terrifying experience of immediate space’ (‘une terrible expérience d’un espace immédiat’).95 Space is ‘initially happy’ (‘d’abord heureux’), but ‘nevertheless terrible’ (‘pourtant terrible’); the protagonist experiences the ‘pressure’ (‘pression’) of immediate space.96 Cayrol’s protagonist is immersed in space and moves across it, as distinct from the Classical/ Romantic structure that posits a static observer outside a space that they do not enter. Barthes draws the concentrationary motif of the tortuous pressure of space to which Cayrol’s protagonist submits towards the motif of a movement across urban space and the rhythm of this movement, a recurrent trope in the Nouveau Roman and in post-Nouveau Roman fiction, and one that is also prominent, for example, in the developing work of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life. The disturbance of space proper to modernity brings with it a profound crisis, because instead of a reassuring hierarchy Cayrolian man encounters ‘an unsettling juxtaposition of surfaces’ (‘une juxtaposition inquiétante de surfaces’), whose order is contingent.97 The position of man in this universe is no longer assured, or assumed, underlining the difference of what I have called Cayrol’s ‘humanism of the first man’ from classical humanism; as Barthes notes ‘there is a crisis of humanism’ (‘il y a crise d’humanisme’).98 But Cayrol’s protagonist is not absolutely severed from his

82 | patrick ffrench

fellow beings; the direction of travel across the three phases of the trilogy Barthes is considering here shows ‘a truly sociological evolution’ (‘une véritable montée de la sociologie’), a movement (back) to sociality.99 Barthes proposes that ‘it is a question of repatriating a weak and foreign man, whose Heart itself no longer has identity, into a humanity solidly woven through with inaccessible relationships’.100 While this relates to a generalized problematic of alienation, it is also a specific phenomenon of post-concentrationary exile and return, the question of how to find a way back in to the human. Barthes points here to the logic in Cayrol’s work of ‘love by procuration’.101 For Cayrol’s protagonist, the love of others is a spectacle, but there is also ‘a general order of charity’ (‘un ordre général de charité’).102 If the novels show that an engagement in the love of others, through jealousy, is the first ‘bite’ (‘morsure’) of a solid relation to others, there is a deeper level of charity and empathy: The whole novel tends to show that there is an order of existences, perhaps those who have survived the camps, for whom the capacity to assume a human suffering formed in our own personal history is a rich and intense human faculty, an extremely elaborate moment of triumph before which there existed a time of unbelievable poverty.103 The capacity to suffer ‘personally’ is an attainment, a property of which concentrationary man is deprived and towards which he strives. The Lazarean figure suffers the consequences of this exile from ‘normal’ human activity and undergoes – at least in Cayrol’s novels – the process of reabsorption into this tissue of relations, initially through objects, as noted before, then through an observation of the couple, then through a vicarious experience of love. But there is also a movement beyond this point; Barthes proposes that, in the shift in the protagonist’s relations with the novel’s female characters Lucette and Francine, there is a movement towards transcendence, and ultimately a rejection of the world of objects and of society. Ultimately, Cayrol’s novels perform what Barthes calls a ‘sociological’ movement, from a post-cataclysmic state of impoverishment, through an observation of the object world to the vicarious experience of emotion and love, to transcendence. The society in which the narrator exists, and in which he must learn to live again, is ultimately discredited in favour of a transcendent beyond: ‘The historical society constituted around the narrator is discredited at the same time as something beyond the human is affirmed in the figure of the young woman’.104 At this point Barthes contrasts Cayrol’s transcendent humanism with Camus’s ethics of human solidarity. If for Camus the ultimate value is that of the human community, for Cayrol, society is flawed, insufficient, and inevitably corrupt, in a process of disaggregation. For Barthes, despite Cayrol’s ultimately theological ethos, the latter offers a more acute and critical analysis of alienation and ‘an evident derision of humanist euphoria’, ‘a contradiction to Camus’.105 Camus’s ‘communitarian’ ethos is implicitly rejected by a utopic Marxism and a tragic Christian humanism, both of which diagnose the evil now inherent in the social fabric. It is important, however,

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 83

that this utopia or transcendence is neither named nor represented, and what the novels give us is ‘the existential trajectory of the hero’ (‘le trajet existentiel du héros’), the movement towards it.106 Barthes underlines how rather than the affirmation of any specified utopia or transcendent possibility, literature is the object of a choice and an act.107 For Barthes the value of Cayrol’s novelistic enterprise is not the transcendent term, the end, to which it is implicitly oriented, but the fact that it does not take literature or the novel for granted, as already constituted signs. It thus constitutes an act or a choice, a commitment to action in view of a different world rather than the affirmation of the value of this one. Literature is both tragic and utopian. This existential ethos is the precondition for what will develop later in Barthes’s thought as the practice of writing or of the text.

Vicissitudes of Lazarus 1954–65 Subsequent to his substantial engagement with Cayrol’s novels of 1951 to 1952, the question of concentrationary or Lazarean writing would undergo a number of developments, both explicit and implicit, across Barthes’s critical interventions. These will see various positionings with relation to the issues we have encountered already; the absurd, the question of objects, the look, movement across space. What is consistent is the emphasis placed on writing as an act, a commitment at the level of form. Barthes’s theory of writing has its roots in his early encounter with Cayrol, where the existential and the poetic are by necessity coincident. In close proximity to the concerns, discussed above, of the last few pages of the essay on Cayrol, Barthes would engage in 1955 in a debate with Camus which relates back to the Occupation, following a review of the novel The Plague (La Peste). Barthes noted the underlying analogy between the Plague and the Occupation, but added that, in contrast to the stark contrast between human frailty and the ‘pure metal’ (‘pur métal’) of the plague itself, ‘evil sometimes has a human face’ (‘le mal a quelquefois un visage humain’).108 Barthes’s closing and critical point with regard to the novel was that by opting ultimately for a morality of solidarity and a refusal to take sides, to be ‘neither executioner nor victim’ (‘ni bourreau, ni victime’) (the title of a series of texts by Camus in Combat in 1948), Camus was turning his back on history, on the facts and contingencies which did situate victims and executioners on different ‘sides’. In a further response to Camus, Barthes also argues here for a refusal of analogy, for sticking to the fact, as against what he will refer to in a later essay, ‘Pre-Novels’, as the mendacious myth of depth. This is ‘the only possible account of a History whose evils are only redeemable if we look at them in their absolute specificity, and not as symbols or as germinations of a possible equivalence’.109 Despite the critique of Camus’s morality of solidarity, however, it is important to insist on the fact that Camus’s first novel The Outsider (L’Étranger) was a significant point of reference for Barthes’s developing sense of the novel, in which Cayrol’s Lazarean ethos is also crucial. In a 1954 piece on The Outsider, Barthes reiterates some

84 | patrick ffrench

of the key aspects of the text: Meursault’s silence on the ‘reasons’ of the world, his consequent withdrawal into the position of a look (‘le recul d’un regard’), which is precisely what society cannot tolerate, the purity or ‘mattness’ (‘matité’) of his act.110 In discussing the freshness, almost twelve years after its first publication, of Camus’s text, Barthes proposes that ‘[d]oubtless the path traced by Camus has been trodden since by many; a whole “Lazarean” literature has developed; it gives man, whether believer or not, the innocence, wisdom and solitude of someone brought back from the dead’.111 The explicit reference to a Lazarean literature here is significant, as it links Camus’s novel of 1942 to subsequent, post-war developments in the novel, while insisting on the suspension of the world that it operates. This is also visible in a short review of May 1953, Words are also Lodgings (Les Mots sont aussi des demeures), in which Barthes comments on Cayrol’s poetry as a return to language, to the fact of things that are said.112 This is a language without excuse or alibi, Barthes asserts, which has abandoned the ‘pose’ or ‘numen’ of poetry in a re-insistence on the work of language as such, ‘a capital restoration of language’ (‘une restauration capital du langage’).113 Returning to the same motifs as in his longer essay on the novels, Barthes affirms the status of Cayrol’s language as a quasi-nominalist ‘pre-adamic’ naming which brings a world into being, for which ‘the word is the object’ (‘le mot est l’objet’).114 Here he strategically establishes a continuity between the literature of the absurd and the Lazarean literature ordained and called for by Cayrol. The continuity is established on the basis of the same emphasis on exile (‘dépaysement’), on a withdrawal from socially sanctioned norm and conventions. The Lazarean motif signalled by Barthes through the motif of resuscitation is thus focused around the rupture with a previous life, and with an objective, ‘innocent’ look. The ‘resuscitated man’ is not the one who has ‘returned’ to a previous life or who has come ‘back to life’, as the saying has it, but who has broken with the life of before, who has essentially died in relation to it but continues to look at the world with the eyes of the survivor. There is a Blanchotian inflection here: Lazarus is the one whose death has been resuscitated, who persists in a permanent state of exile. The extension of the Lazarean is elaborated by Barthes in a short essay of June 1954, in which he gives the name ‘pre-novels’ to a group of writers including Cayrol, referring here to Cayrol’s novel The Space of a Night (L’Espace d’une nuit), and Robbe-Grillet, referring to The Erasers (Les Gommes). The notion of the ‘pre-novel’ resumes the tendency to refuse the conventional signs of ‘literature’ and to ‘return’ to language, and it resonates with the ‘adamic’ tendency of Cayrol’s work. Barthes posits this as a ‘crisis’ of the novel that can be traced back to the ‘suspended’ character of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). In Cayrol’s work, Barthes emphasizes the notion that the ‘human’ habitus has to be made anew; it is ‘a slow derivation on the surface of a human domain which is all to be constructed, and whose structure will only find itself established once the novel has closed’.115 Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, does not seek to question the familiarity of the world as such, but engages us in a reorganization of literary space, introducing an

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 85

‘Einsteinian’ dimension of the object, ‘a new mixture of space and time’ (‘un mixte nouveau d’espace et de temps’).116 These are evidently distinct directions – Cayrol’s writing lacks the superimposed temporality of Robbe-Grillet’s objects, but what these works have in common is ‘the same way of approaching the look’ (‘une même manière d’accomoder le regard’), an ‘exploration of surfaces’ (‘exploration des surfaces’) an interrogation ‘at the very heart of description’ (‘au cœur même de la description’).117 Barthes describes this as a fundamental subversion of the basic elements of the novel.118 The doubt that Barthes sees in operation here suggests a form of phenomenological reduction or époché, from which psychology and metaphysics are nonetheless absent, as it is a question of refusing the myth of depth and of bringing ‘man back to the surface of his domain’ (‘ramener l’homme à la surface de son domaine’).119 The ‘pre-novel’ extends Lazarean literature through a stress on language and a withdrawal from the myths of literature; it names a literature of ‘suspension’, inaugurated by Proust, but which finds a specific pertinence with Cayrol’s work.

After Lazarus Barthes’s postulation in ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ was that concentrationary literature was contemporary and that Cayrol’s writing, including the essay Lazarus Among Us, had outlined the programme for the literature of the avant-garde. We have seen the key emphases of this mode of writing across Cayrol’s work and in Barthes’s critical interventions between the late 1940s and the early 1960s: the disruption of presence and of time which makes for a displacement from the world, which appears absurd, yet uncannily familiar; the obsessive focus on objects and on their surfaces; the reduction of subjectivity to a look; the prominence of an experience of the phenomenal thickness of the world, rather than dependence on established signs. Across these various tropes of Lazarean writing what dominates perhaps is the sense of writing as an existential choice, as a commitment to existence expressed at the level of form. This is, as Cayrol had proposed, a renewal of literature, albeit through a step away from it, a movement back to the pre-novel, to the beginnings of the literary act. The essay ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ from 1964, which I cited at the beginning of this chapter, would be Barthes’s final piece on Cayrol. It supersedes the relatively shortlived moment of Barthes’s critical attention to Robbe-Grillet, initially very much with the grain of his work on Cayrol, through the emphasis on an ‘objective’ literature. However, by 1964, and thereafter, Barthes had new allies and interests in the literary field, specifically the writers and theorists of the avant-garde review Tel Quel and the theorization of textuality. While their work (the novels of Sollers, Baudry, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean Thibaudeau, for example) also deployed Lazarean tropes, the currency of this figure has less purchase and disappears from the critical agenda. Michel Foucault, in an essay on the work of Tel Quel writers and poets in Critique in 1963, proposes that their work exists in the space opened up by Robbe-Grillet, for example, and omits to mention Cayrol.120 Despite his crucial role in the formation of

86 | patrick ffrench

Tel Quel, through the review of ‘new writers’ in Écrire, which he established in 1956 and which gave writers such as Sollers, Pleynet and others their first publications, the importance of Cayrol’s own work as an explicitly critical paradigm is not a major factor. This is perhaps because, as Barthes points out in ‘Erasure’, Cayrol was not prone to the systematization of his own ideas and practice. Lazarus does not ordain a theory of literature, but operates as a figure evoking an experience, both biographical and historical. It is perhaps, then, in the divergence between the theory of writing and the existential practice and lived experience of writing that the reasons for the generalized forgetting of the formative importance of Lazarus Among Us, and of Cayrol himself, might be found. The theory of textuality that Barthes develops in the late 1960s and into the next decade displaces the earlier emphasis on the existential dimension, yet it emerges out of the dislocation of presence provoked by the lived experience of ‘the Lazarean subject’. With the benefit of hindsight, it might now be time to redress this erasure and reemphasize the central role of Cayrol and of his notion of the Lazarean in the formation of the ethos and direction of post-war literary theory and practice in France, thus regrounding the literary-theoretical focus of the later period back in the historical conditions from which it emerged. But the implications might also go further than this: in proposing points of contact between the hitherto distinct critical idioms that have accumulated around Barthesian textuality, on the one hand, and Holocaust writing, on the other, the significant theoretical and ethical implications of the temporality of the return and of erasure would also need to be addressed, as part of a broader historicization of theory and a concomitant theorization of history.

Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London, where he works on twentieth-century French literature and thought. He is the author of The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (Oxford, 1996), The Cut: Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (British Academy, 2000), After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Legenda, 2007) and Thinking Cinema with Proust (Legenda, 2018). He has also coedited The Tel Quel Reader (Routledge, 1998) and a special issue of The Oxford Literary Review on Jean-Luc Nancy (2005). He has also written on Proust, Freud, French film and film theory. A book on Barthes and cinema is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2019.

Notes 1. R. Barthes, ‘Cayrol and Erasure’ in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 189–90 (translation modified). Roland Barthes, ‘La Rature’ in Œuvres complètes Tome I: 1942–1965 (Paris: 1993), 1437–38. Barthes’s essay was originally published as a postface to a reprint of Cayrol’s novel Foreign Bodies (New York: Putnam, 1960). For the original French see Les Corps étrangers (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1964). References to works by Cayrol or Barthes

lazarean writing in post-war france

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

| 87

where a published translation exists will be to these translations. All other translations are my own except where otherwise indicated. Barthes, ‘Cayrol and Erasure’, 187; ‘La Rature’, 1436. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1; ‘Le désastre ruine tout en laissant tout en l’état,’ Maurice Blanchot, L’Ecriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 7. On Muriel, see M. John, ‘Running the Film against the Reel: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean figure in Alain Resnais’ Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds.), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Resistance and Cultural Memories (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 83–103; and E. Wilson, ‘Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’ in Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 87–107. Translated in this volume as ‘Lazarean Literature’. G. Pollock and M. Silverman, ‘Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema’ in Pollock and Silverman (eds.), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), 10–13. The relevant texts by Agamben would include Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), The Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 1999) and ‘What is a Camp?’ in Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 37–44. Pollock and Silverman, ‘Introduction’, 19 Pollock and Silverman, ‘Introduction’, 28. Yéfime, B. d’Astorg, A. Béguin, ‘Peut-on collaborer à l’univers concentrationnaire?’ in Esprit 11 (Nov 1947), 705. The specific reference is to Béguin’s essay ‘Le choix des victimes’. C.-E. Magny, ‘La parabole de Lazare ou le langage retrouvé’, Esprit (February 1948), 311–23. ‘. . . que Lazare ressuscite par un miracle, personne n’a envie de l’interroger et lui-même ne semble manifester (comme d’ailleurs le fils du charpentier) qu’une envie très limitée de se raconter. Parler c’est encore toucher et être touché. Et puis, quand on a appris à la boucler pendant un an, deux ans, trois ans, on est devenu un peu sceptique quant aux possibilités de communication que le langage offre à l’homme. Depuis longtemps déjà, Maurice Blanchot, Brice Parain, Jean Paulhan, ont mis en question, sur le plan abstrait, cette supposée puissance du langage l’expérience des camps, elle, la met en accusation et de la façon la plus concrète qu’il soit,’ Magny, ‘La Parabole de Lazare’, 311. Magny, ‘La Parabole de Lazare’, 312. John 11, 1–44. There are two distinct figures of Lazarus in the New Testament. The first appears in Luke, and is an ulcerated beggar who is saved, in contrast to a rich man who is damned. Consensus suggests that Cayrol’s Lazarus is the figure in John, who is raised from the dead by Jesus. M. Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 327; ‘Le langage de la littérature est la recherche de ce moment qui la précède. Généralement, elle le nomme existence elle veut le chat tel qu’il existe, le galet dans son parti pris de chose, non pas l’homme, mais celui-ci et, dans celui-ci, ce que l’homme rejette pour le dire, ce qui est le fondement de la parole et que la parole exclut pour parler, l’abîme, le Lazare du tombeau et non le Lazare rendu au jour, celui qui déjà sent mauvais, qui est le Mal, le Lazare perdu et non le Lazare sauvé et ressuscité,’ Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 316. See ‘Le grand refus’ in Nouvelle revue française 82 (October 1959), 678–89 and ‘Lire’ in Nouvelle nouvelle revue française (May 1953). In the latter text, which also appears in The Space of Literature, Blanchot likens the reader to Christ before the tomb of Lazarus who utters the words ‘Lazar, veni foras’ (‘Lazarus, come out’). Lazarus also features in Blanchot’s early novel, Thomas the Obscure, and this instance is explored by contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in ‘Blanchot’s Resurrection’ in Dis-enclosure; the Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham, 2008). G. Bataille, Blue of Noon (London: Penguin, 2012), 17, 19, 23, 29; Romans et récits (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2009), 399, 401, 405, 412. Dieu vivant was published by Seuil and ran from 1945 to 1955, totaling 27 issues. Vercors was the pseudonym of Jean Bruller, co-founder of the Editions de Minuit. His novel Les armes de la nuit was published in 1946.

88 | patrick ffrench

19. J. Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, Dieu vivant 7 (2ème trimestre, 1947), 7. 20. Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 8. 21. ‘La machine était viciée dès la première victime; les rouages étaient faussés dès le dernier regard du premier mourant, ce regard qui n’avait jamais appartenu au bourreau; comme dans la machine à tuer l’homme de la ‘Colonie pénitentiaire’ de Kafka, il y avait aussi la “transfiguration du visage torturé” et dans tout visage “décrassé d’une si étrange façon par les ordures” ainsi que le dit Catherine de Siene, c’était une Joie dont le bourreau lui-même était atteint car l’homme met fin aux ténèbres dans les pires ténèbres,’ Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 9. Cayrol refers here to Franz Kafka’s tale ‘In the Penal Settlement’ which depicts a horrific execution machine which literally ‘writes’ the sentence into the body of the condemned man. At the last moment the surrounding observers are absorbed in ‘the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer’. See F. Kafka, ‘In the Penal Settlement’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 184. 22. Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 9. 23. ‘Rien ne peut être entendu du témoignage des survivants des Camps si ce témoignage n’est pas celui meme de la Croix, si l’on ne considère pas les Camps comme la plus extraordinaire tentative de défense et d’illustration de la Croix, la croix poussée au paroxysme de la Croix, car celle-ci n’a pas fini de nous surprendre,’ Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 9. 24. ‘seul un Chrétien “ordinaire” peut “désamorcer” les Camps comme un obus sans risque de danger,’ Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 9. 25. ‘dans les flammes de l’Unique Charité,’ Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 9. 26. ‘la notion du prochain disparaît dans cette défiguration continuelle,’ Cayrol, ‘Liminaire’, 12. 27. Jean Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 29; Lazare parmi nous in Œuvre lazaréene (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 763. 28. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 29; Lazare parmi nous, 763. 29. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 29; Lazare parmi nous, 764. 30. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 30; ‘Nos lendemains n’ont plus qu’un odeur d’abattoir. C’est nous les cadavres, ne l’oublions pas,’ Lazare parmi nous, 764. 31. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 31; ‘la corruption mystérieuse de notre monde par l’élément concentrationnaire ou lazaréens,’ Lazare parmi nous, 765. 32. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 31; Lazare parmi nous, 765. 33. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 31; ‘Il n’a de témérité que dans sa maladie, il n’a d’audace que dans son infirmité,’ Lazare parmi nous, 766. 34. See C. Baudelaire, ‘Invitation to the Voyage’ in The Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford World Classics); ‘Moi j’ai trouvé ma tulipe noire et mon dahlia bleu,’ ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ in Le Spleen de Paris, Œuvres complètes Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 303. 35. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 33; Lazare parmi nous, 769. 36. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 34; ‘Ces perspectives chatoyantes de la nuit se superposaient à son existence quotidienne et lui donnaient la possibilité d’être ‘Ailleurs’, d’être avec les autres sans être comme les autres; ells l’aidaient à refuser totalement l’emprise horrible de la journée et à lui prêter d’autres ‘intonations,’ Lazare parmi nous, 770. 37. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 35; Lazare parmi nous, 772, 773. 38. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 35; Lazare parmi nous, 773. 39. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 36; ‘Le prisonnier n’était jamais là où on le frappait,’ Lazare parmi nous, 773. 40. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 37; ‘[P]eu a peu, l’image du monde réel se transfigurait, s’embellissait, devenait l’Image idéal du monde de demain, une image préfabriquée, fignolée, qui, au moment du retour, s’est effondrée trop brutalement pour quelques-uns et les a entraîneés à poursuivre dans le suicide l’image idéale de l’au-delà celeste,’ Lazare parmi nous, 775. 41. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 37; ‘une sensation de flottement, d’état de vagabondage mental et sans racines,’ Lazare parmi nous, 776. 42. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; ‘Il n’y a rien à expliquer,’ ‘Lazare parmi nous’, 801. In ‘Témoignage et littérature’, Esprit (April 1953). Cayrol is critical of a tendency he sees to incorporate the camps as

lazarean writing in post-war france

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

| 89

an element in the representational content of the novel. He sees this as a symptom of a generalized ‘forgetting’ and moreover, a sanitization of the experience. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; ‘Lazare parmi nous’, 801. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; Lazare parmi nous, 801. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; ‘ceux qui n’ont connu que par ouï-dire les camps commencent à avoir les tics majeurs de cet univers’, Lazare parmi nous, 801. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; ‘Ne peut-elle se renouveler, elle aussi, par cette ultime filiation, avec cete effervescence démoniaque,’ Lazare parmi nous, 801. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49; Lazare parmi nous, 802. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 50; Lazare parmi nous, 802. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 50; ‘Nous attendons aujourd’hui des écrivains conquérants, qui n’ont pas honte d’enjamber les cadavres ou la pourriture . . .,’ Lazare parmi nous, 802. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 50; Lazare parmi nous, 803. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 51; Lazare parmi nous, 804. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 51; Lazare parmi nous, 805. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 51; ‘tous les événements, même les plus familiers, nous demeurent incompréhensibles, répréhensibles, rebutants, irritants,’ Lazare parmi nous, 805. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 52; Lazare parmi nous, 805. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 53; Lazare parmi nous, 807. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 54; ‘Rien ne sera plus surprenant’; ‘Toute création devient imprévisible, inhumaine, car elle se fait aussi bien qu’elle se défait sans raison apparente,’ Lazare parmi nous, 809. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 55; ‘Le romanesque lazaréen a pour base la solitude où l’être vivra l’excés d’une vie, son dérèglement,’ Lazare parmi nous, 811. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 56; Lazare parmi nous, 813. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 58; ‘Il n’y a pas d’histoire dans un Romanesque lazaréen, de ressort, d’intrigue’, Lazare parmi nous, 815. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 58; Lazare parmi nous, 817. Cayrol,Lazarus Among Us, 61; ‘Le héros lazaréen n’est jamais là où il se trouve,’ Lazare parmi nous, 820. R. Barthes, ‘Réflexion sur le style de l’Étranger’ in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 63. ‘rien n’est plus contraire à la logique de l’absurde que de témoigner, même sur l’absurde’, Barthes, ‘Réflexion’, 61, ‘un style en accord avec notre détresse irremediable,’ Barthes, ‘Réflexions’, 63. ‘Le problème pour nos écrivains d’aujourd’hui c’est donc de couper l’écriture dès ses origins historiques, c’est-à-dire, en fait, politiques,’ R. Barthes, ‘Responsabilité de la grammaire’ in Œuvres complètes 1, 88. ‘Cet Ailleurs des rêves concentrationnaires est exactement de même nature que l’alibi poétique, et cela permet de mesurer combine la poésie échappe à la littérature,’ R. Barthes, ‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’ in Œuvres complètes 1, 88. M. Blanchot ‘Les Justes’, L’Observateur July 1950, republished in M. Blanchot, La condition critique: articles 1945–1998 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 179. ‘qui conçoit le drame humain seulement comme le drame d’une durée,’ R. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 115. ‘Le continu cayrolien n’est pas fait d’une intrigue, au sens habituel du mot; c’est un continu d’épisodes, de rencontres, de descriptions, dans lequel l’événement est ramené à une sorte d’état zéro, dont la minceur déconcert,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 116. ‘Simplement, dans un temps intérieur infiniment reculé, repoussé par quelque cataclysme innommé – comme peut-être les Camps – en deça de l’humain, il y a une institution progressive dans un monde déjà institué dans ses assisses inhumaines (les objets),’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 117. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 117. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 117.

90 | patrick ffrench

73. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 117. 74. See M. Crowley, Robert Antelme and L’homme sans: politiques de la finitude (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2009). Certain inflections of Barthes’s account might also enable us to associate the state of Cayrol’s Lazarean protagonist, who Barthes says is ‘provided with an inalienable quality as a creature’, (‘muni de sa qualité inaliénable de créature’, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 117) with the ‘creaturely’ as delineated by Eric Santner. See E. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 75. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 118. 76. ‘la chair prive facilement l’homme de son passé et le maintient dans un temps purement biologique, sans Histoire antécédente,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 118. 77. ‘C’est au fond parce que l’homme cayrolien a un corps et le sent exister, que son itinéraire Romanesque, bien qu’il le conduise de naissance à naissance, ne peut partir que d’un homme déjà conçu, sorti de la nuit dans une faiblesse immense, mais pourtant déjà armé de sa qualité d’homme. Cette donnée essentielle du roman cayrolien impose à l’Histoire une réserve permanente,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 118. 78. ‘le drame cayrolien tient dans cette survivance de l’homme à la privation de son passé,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 118. 79. ‘des choses fabriquées, et d’usage menu, un couteau, une cigarette, un sandwich, des berlingots, un œuf dur, de la vanille, une pomme, des accessoires utiles et quotidiens, les attributs d’une société déjà toute formée,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 121. 80. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 121. 81. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 122. We will also find this idea with Barthes’s writing on RobbeGrillet. In ‘Objective Literature’, Barthes writes of Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers that language is the ‘rapture of a surface . . . meant to caress the object’ (‘élongement à même une surface . . . chargé de caresser l’objet’). Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 14. 82. ‘les linéaments d’une sociologie, un côtoiement, un coude à coude et une complicité humaine,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 122. 83. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 120. 84. ‘une institution progressive de l’homme dans un monde déjà institué dans ses assises inhumaines (les objets)’, Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 116. 85. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 119. 86. ‘il part d’une sorte d’état zéro qui saisit à la fois le temps et l’espace ce qui lui donne chaque fois qu’un objet ou un souvenir surgit cette attention minutieuse et pourtant détachée, cette longue palpation du matériau si étrangère aux vrais propriétaires,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 119. 87. See ‘The Object World’’ in Barthes, Critical Essays. 88. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 122. 89. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 122. 90. Sollers’s novel Le Parc (Paris: Seuil, 1961) features multiple images of a park seen through the balustrade of an apartment window; Jean-Louis Baudry’s Les Images (Paris: Seuil, 1963) is constructed around the tensions between visual perceptions, virtual mirror images and reflections, and memory images. 91. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 122. 92. ‘le Temps reconquis, l’homme cayrolien n’aura pas besoin de s’arrêter aux simples objets,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 123. 93. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 123. 94. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 123. 95. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 124. 96. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 124. 97. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 125. 98. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 125. 99. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 126.

lazarean writing in post-war france

| 91

100. ‘il s’agit de rapatrier un homme faible, étranger, dont le Cœur meme n’a plus d’identité, dans une humanité solidement tissée de rapports inaccessibles,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 126–27. 101. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 127. 102. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 127. 103. ‘Tout le roman de Cayrol tend à montrer qu’il y a un ordre d’existences, peut-être celles qui ont survécu aux camps – où le pouvoir d’assurer une souffrance humaine formée dans note propre et personelle histoire constitue un état lourd et riche de l’humanité, un triomphe très élaboré en deça duquel il a existé des temps d’une incroyable pauvreté,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 127. 104. ‘La société historique qui est constitué autour du narrateur est discreditée en même temps qu’un audelà de l’humain s’affirme dans la figure même de la jeune fille,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 127. 105. ‘une dérision évidente des euphories humanistes’; ‘une réponse contradictoire à Camus,’ Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 129. 106. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 130. 107. Barthes, ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, 151. 108. R. Barthes, ‘“La Peste”: Annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude’ in Barthes, Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 455. 109. ‘le seul respect possible d’une Histoire dont les maux ne sont remédiables que si on les regarde dans leur propriété absolu, et non comme des symbols ou des germes possibles d’équivalence,’ Barthes, ‘“La Peste”‘, 479. 110. R. Barthes, ‘“L’Étranger”, roman solaire’ in Barthes, Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 399. 111. ‘Sans doute, le chemin tracé par Camus a-t-il été foulé depuis par beaucoup; toute une littérature “lazaréene”, selon le mot juste de Jean Cayrol s’est developpé, qui donne à l’homme, croyant ou non, l’innocence, la sagesse et la solitude d’un ressuscité,’ Barthes, ‘L’Étranger’, 399. 112. ‘R. Barthes, ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’ in Barthes, Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 212. 113. Barthes, ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’, 213. 114. Barthes, ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’, 213. 115. ‘une lente dérivation à la surface d’un domaine humain qui est tout à faire, et dont la structure se trouverait constituée au moment même où le livre se clot,’ R. Barthes, ‘Pré-romans’ in Barthes, Œuvres complètes vol. 1, 416. 116. Barthes, ‘Pré-romans’, 417. 117. Barthes, ‘Pré-romans’, 417. 118. Barthes, ‘Pré-romans’, 417. 119. Barthes, ‘Pré-romans’, 417. 120. M. Foucault, ‘Distance, Aspect, Origin’, in P. ffrench and R.-F. Lack (eds.) The Tel Quel Reader (London: Routledge, 1998). See also P. ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996).

Bibliography Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. The Remnants of Auschwitz. New York: Zone Books, 1999. ———. ‘What is a Camp?’ in Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 37–44. Barthes, R. ‘Réflexion sur le style de l’Étranger’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 60–63. ———. ‘Responsabilité de la grammaire’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 79–81. ———. ‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 88.

92 | patrick ffrench

———. ‘Jean Cayrol et ses romans’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 115–131. ———. ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 212–13. ———. ‘“L’Étranger”, roman solaire’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 398–400. ———. ‘Pré-romans’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942–1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 416–18. ———. ‘“La Peste”: Annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude’, in Œuvres complètes vol. 1 1942– 1965. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993, 452–56. ———. ‘The Object-World’ in Critical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 4–12. ———. ‘Objective Literature’ in Critical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 13– 24. ———. ‘Cayrol and Erasure’, in The Rustle of Language. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, 181–90. Bataille, G. Blue of Noon. London: Penguin, 2012. Baudelaire, C. ‘Invitation to the Voyage’ in The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1993, 109–11. Baudry, J.-L. Les Images. Paris: Seuil, 1963. Blanchot, M. ‘Lire’. Nouvelle nouvelle revue française, 1:5 (May 1953), 876–83. ———. ‘Le Grand refus’. Nouvelle Revue française, 82 (October 1959), 678–89. ———. The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 300–44. ———. ‘Les Justes’ in La Condition critique: articles 1945–1998. Paris: Gallimard, 2010, 178–181. Cayrol, J. ‘Liminaire’. Dieu vivant 7 (2ème trimestre, 1947), 7–10. ———. ‘Témoignage et littérature’. Esprit (April 1953), 575–77. ———. Œuvre lazaréene. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Crowley, M. L’Homme sans: politiques de la finitude. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2009. ———. Robert Antelme, l’humanité irréductible. Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2004. ffrench, P. The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. Foucault, M. ‘Distance, Aspect, Origin’ in P. ffrench and R.-F. Lack (eds.) The Tel Quel Reader. London: Routledge, 1998, 97–122. John, M. ‘Running the Film against the Reel: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean figure in Alain Resnais’ Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds.), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Resistance and Cultural Memories. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014, 83–103. Kafka, F. ‘In the Penal Settlement’ in Metamorphoses and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 167–99. Magny, C.-E. ‘La Parabole de Lazare ou le langage retrouvé’. Esprit (Feb. 1948), 311–23. Nancy, J.-L. ‘Blanchot’s Resurrection’ in J.-L. Nancy, Dis-enclosure; the Deconstruction of Christianity. New York: Fordham, 2008, 89–97. Pollock, G. and M. Silverman. ‘Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011, 1–54. Pollock, G. and M. Silverman (eds). Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011. ———. Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Resistance and Cultural Memories. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Santner, E. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Sollers, P. Le Parc. Paris: Seuil, 1961. Wilson, E. ‘Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’, in E. Wilson, Alain Resnais. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, 87–107. Yéfime, B. d’Astorg and A. Béguin. ‘Peut-on collaborer à l’univers concentrationnaire? Esprit 11 (Nov. 1947), 685–705.

CHAPTER 2

The Perpetual Anxiety of Lazarus the gaze, the tomb and the body in the shroud Griselda Pollock

The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the Resurrection of Lazarus – as Rousset indicates in the title of his book [The Days of Our Death]. —Hannah Arendt, 19481 What are the implications for contemporary artistic practice of Jean Cayrol’s evocation of the returnee, the concentration camp survivor, through the figure of Lazarus? Recast as a concept, the Lazarean is not only a term for an affective condition impressed onto the returned prisoner, it also becomes a proposition for a concentrationary art that should constantly disturb the present and expose the rupture that has occurred in everyday life as a result of the ‘concentrationary event’ in history.2 Yet how can a concept – seemingly Christian in origin but given, post-war, a specifically political, if not entirely secular, reinterpretation – be taken theoretically and aesthetically beyond its theological source in our study of the post-war, post-genocidal political aesthetics of resistance to the enlarged field of totalitarian assault on democratic humanity whose deepest crime involved racialized, exterminatory dehumanization? Using such terms to elaborate the cultural resonance of the Lazarean brings into this reading Hannah Arendt, Jewish political theorist of the meaning of the concentration camp, Catholic poet and literary theorist Jean Cayrol and Jewish survivor-author, Elie Wiesel.3 In Cayrol’s writing, the returnee is Lazarean not only because he or she carries an incommunicable memory indelibly stamped on his or her mind and body. She or he returns to a society at once already contaminated with the logic of the concentrationary while unaware that this is so. The character of this contamination lies not in overt forms of persistent fascism alone – for which there are both new political sites and penetrations of the everyday – but in the structural relations between the

94 | griselda pollock

norms of contemporary capitalist exploitation, with its relentless instrumentalization of humans for the economic logic of profit, and those spaces of exception or of the extreme application of such (ab)use of the dehumanized body that the concentrationee has seen with her or his own eyes and experienced through her or his own physical torture under the regime named ‘annihilation through labour’. Vernichtung durch Arbeit (Annihilation through labour) was one of the principles for the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) category of internee in the concentrationary universe, in contrast to the extermination camp system which delivered, on an industrial scale, immediate killing on arrival. The Lazarean thus evokes a complex figure straddling incommensurate spaces and incomparable experiences, both there and here, then and now. The affliction of the returnee with terror embedded in body and mind is to suffer both a knowledge of there – the camp universe – and an insight into the here – what can never again be ‘home’, or ‘life as it was before’, which is also seen with eyes that perceive the shocking continuity between the extreme instance and the normal. The Lazarean brings back not only intimate contact with a death-place, a tomb-world, but also a gaze on the present from that place. This is the anxiety of the Lazarean. I am seeking to draw out the cultural and imaginative force of the Lazarean as an evocation of a historically and politically novel condition, which becomes even more compelling as a figuration of a twentieth century experience once we examine its textual complexity in the Christian biblical text from which it stems, and then situate it aesthetically in relation to the search for a figurative language to articulate a concentrationary art. That art was, for Cayrol and those whom he influenced, an aesthetically delivered warning, an instance of a shocked and shocking resistance to a pervasive legacy of a complex, if differentiated, politically generated system that, in its extreme exterminatory form, delivered immediate death on an industrial scale and through the use of modern technology. In the extermination camps, being killed was the inescapable horror inflicted on almost all who entered its space. Those camps existed for no other purpose and the rare survivors were often members of the Sonderkommando, the men selected from incoming transports, who were forced to service the death factories, some of whom organized revolts and thus escaped.4 In the massive network of numerous concentration camps within Germany and its satellites, death was often, but not necessarily, an end of prolonged incarceration there. It was delivered through exhaustion from overwork and forced labour, coupled with calculated malnourishment and regular torture, that in some cases led to the ‘polishing off ’ of the ragged remnants of this system in small gas chambers such as those found at Dachau or Ravensbrück. Both forms of camp represent a systematic and calculated assault on humanity. In what David Rousset named ‘the concentrationary universe’, the physical and psychological exposure to the systematic dehumanization of the living was, however, carried beyond the camps by those who, released from enclosure within them, never escaped the camp world’s indelible transformation of their bodies, memories, and the fabric of their subjectivities.5 How

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 95

could this be figured as both a witnessed experience and a cultural-political warning of its existence not only behind but beyond the fences?

Jean Cayrol’s Lazarus as the Nacht und Nebel [Night and Fog] Survivor Jean Cayrol was a recognized, published Surrealist poet before he joined the French resistance to the German Occupation in 1941. He was arrested and deported to the infamous and horrendous concentration camp at Mauthausen in Austria in 1943.6 During his time in Gusen, one of major labour subcamps comprising the vast Mauthausen complex, fellow concentrationees found him paper and pencil to enable him to write poetic fragments that were only published in the 1990s, in a volume in which Cayrol prefaced their reappearance as follows: These texts, which their author refuses to consider as poems, were written in the workshop of a small factory of the camp Gusen-Mauthausen. The inmates were carrying out quality control checks on machinery pieces piled on large tables. Hiding under such contingent cover, the author wrote in semidarkness, without rereading, while work continued above him. . . . Lost at the liberation, the notebooks will return to him 10 years later by an anonymous German. But, in 1955, survivors were advised to forget, to keep silent.7 These recovered fragments of poems written in Gusen carried a broken voice from his internment in ‘the concentrationary universe’ from 1943 to 1945 back to him in France in 1955. It was at the moment that he was composing an anguished voiceover for the film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) in October 1955 directed by Alain Resnais (1922–2014). Earlier, in 1946, however, Cayrol had published a collection of newly composed, post-war poems under the title, Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard (Poems of Night and Fog). In 1950, between his book of poems (1946) and the film voice-over (1955), Cayrol wrote the two texts we are publishing here in translation that fall under the sign of Lazarus: Lazarus Amongst Us. The title for Cayrol’s poems of 1946 translates as Nuit et brouillard the German phrase, Nacht und Nebel. This specifically refers to the name of a directive issued by Hitler on 7 December 1941, which was aimed at both the immediate punishment of those who resisted the German occupation of their countries and the long-term intimidation of the remaining population through inciting fear of the treatment of those arrested by the German forces and deported to Germany and its concentration camps, where the prisoners’ clothing was marked with the code N N to make clear their category. The Nacht und Nebel strategy was to make these men and women disappear leaving no trace through which their families or anyone else could ever find where they were. N N was a living death sentence, which, however, they were to live with for as long as they could survive the conditions of the camp, knowing that their end would leave no record.

96 | griselda pollock

Bearing a poetic reference from Goethe’s Romantic usage and then from Wagner – the phrase appears in his opera Das Rheingold (1869) – Nacht und Nebel has become an everyday expression in German for the disappearance of things or people, vanishing into thin air as it were. For those incarcerated within the concentration camps of Germany under such conditions, the camps thus functioned as a damned world apart, severing them from any hope of contact, rescue or future. This phrase ‘a world apart’ was one of the English titles given to the probing analysis of what French political writer, and Nacht und Nebel deportee to Buchenwald, David Rousset (1912–97) identified as ‘the concentrationary universe’.8 Run by the SS, the experimental realization of a project of total domination, the concentration camp did not aim at immediate destruction of its inmates (as did the extermination camp) but created a novel condition systematically inflicted on living human beings. In her political analysis of the ‘concentration-camp society’, political theorist Hannah Arendt writes: Of great importance for the development of the concentration-camp society was the new type of camp administration. The earlier cruelty of the SA troops, who had been allowed to run wild and kill whomsoever they please, was replaced by a regulated death rate, and a strictly organized torture, calculated not so much to inflict death as to put the victim into a permanent state of dying. . . . The result was that the population in SS camps lived much longer than in earlier camps; one has the impression that new waves of terror or deportation to extermination camps occurred only when new supplies were assured.9 (My emphasis) Arendt then describes what is generally understood as the effect of the Nacht und Nebel decree, a sentence imposed on political resisters in Germany and occupied territories, and all those ultimately incarcerated in the concentrationary universe: Most difficult to imagine and most gruesome to realize is perhaps the complete isolation which separated the camps from the surrounding world as if they and their inmates were no longer part of the world of the living. This isolation, characteristic already of all earlier forms of concentration camps, but carried to perfection only under totalitarian regimes, can hardly be compared to the isolation of prisons, ghettos, or forced labour camps. . . . From the moment of his arrest, nobody in the outside world was supposed to hear of the prisoner again; it is as if he had disappeared from the surface of the earth; he was not even pronounced dead. The earlier custom of the SA to inform the family of the death of a concentration-camp inmate . . . was abolished and replaced by strict instructions to the effect that “third persons are to be left in uncertainty as to the whereabouts of prisoners. . . . This also includes the fact that the relatives may not learn anything when such prisoners die in concentration camps.”10 (my emphasis)

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 97

At the core of the concentrationary, we find not immediate murder, but the constant attenuation of the meaning of any distinction between living and dying – humanly: the preparation of living corpses.11 The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.12 (my emphasis) Furthermore, Hannah Arendt’s magisterial political analysis, subsequently published in 1951 as Origins of Totalitarianism, proposed an analysis of the concentrationary as the symptomatic site of a totalitarian experiment in total domination that involved the progressively applied stages of the destruction of political humanity.13 In her terms, the political means our being capable of speech, action and spontaneity in relation to others who share a common world. Total domination becomes possible, therefore, only once the plurality of a humanity capable of spontaneous action is erased either by absolute destruction of certain groups exiled from all humanity or by the systematic reduction of those enclosed longer term in the camps to mere species; bodies stripped of any singularity, personality, history, and morality by pain and emaciation that reduces any form of being to the mindless organic struggle of the body for life, even at the cost of that body’s consumption of its own tissues in the fight for survival. Resistance, indeed a precisely political resistance, lies in the constant battle against such reduction of singularity, personality and action. Cayrol’s scribbled poetry written under the munitions tables at Gusen marks one such desperate act of resistance. Reclaiming moments of human spontaneity and mutual recognition thus functions in a way that might, with due caution, be termed one dimension of the subject who has become Lazarean: not saved and returned unchanged by temporary inhabitation of the world apart, but one who knows the nature of the struggle to persist as human in dehumanizing conditions, even as those conditions have infected the subject with the attributes of the death-world of the camp. Is there, however, any sense in which this understanding of Lazarean may speak also to, or for, the experience of a Jewish survivor and his or her Lazarean condition in the aftermath of the European Jewish community’s experience of mass annihilation that in effect destroyed Jewish civilization in Europe? This introduces a further sense of the anxiety of Lazarus. Before I bring its many elements into productive play, I want immediately to forestall the risk of thoughtless conflation of the experience of political deportees to Germany’s concentration camp system with the fate of millions of Jewish victims, and the rare Jewish survivors, who suffered a racialized genocide on an industrial scale now commemorated as the Shoah or the Holocaust. Acknowledging both the historical overlap for very few and the political injustice of confounding distinct forms of memory, I shall

98 | griselda pollock

tentatively propose a conversation between Cayrol’s Lazarean prose, with its still Catholic underside, and a classic Jewish text of Holocaust memory, written by Elie Wiesel (1928–2014). To open such a dialogue, we need a biblical and an artistic digression.

Imag(in)ing Lazarus The biblical Lazarus is an ambiguous, if not a theologically problematic, figure as we encounter his literary creation in the fourth Gospel—The Gospel of John. Apparently brought back from the dead by a pre-crucifixion Jesus, Lazarus cannot be a clear-cut signifier of salvation by resurrection. Theologically, saving mortal humanity from mortality can only be effected by the sacrifice and miraculous resurrection of the incarnated divine Jesus himself. Instead, as a literary figure occurring in the text of the latest Gospel, Lazarus signifies an encounter with death that is carried back to a continuing, but ever-tainted, life. This was perhaps this condition that spoke to Cayrol’s sense of his own concentrationary experience as persisting beyond liberation as a perpetual state and as an agonizingly piercing perception of the deathliness in the living world to which he returned. For post-war writers, aware of Christian scriptures, Lazarus already occupied a place in the canon of Western Christian literature as a character from a story in the Gospel of John. He was, however, as Marie-Laure Basuyaux has shown, also a device already circulating in French literature during the early 1940s and serving as an intimation of the catastrophic present. Other writers such as Maurice Blanchot chose the classical figure of Orpheus, visitor to the underworld and sole returnee.14 What thus distinguishes Cayrol’s contribution to the post-war political writing by deportees about the concentrationary system is his choice of a figure from Christian literature, Lazarus, both to voice the experience of the returnee and to address the society on which the returnee now gazes. It is in radical opposition to that structure of the concentrationary universe that we can locate Cayrol’s concept of a concentrationary art, whose figure he, a Catholic Christian, took, as we know from biographical evidence, from the biblical literature he re-encountered in Mauthausen through two priests: the Christian Gospels. Lazarus is, however, a unique and complex figure in Western myth, legend and art in terms not only of his specific condition of being a revenant, but also of his figurative association with the clothing of the dead, the shroud, and the place of the dead, the tomb. Unlike the Greek and Roman mythic figures Odysseus/Ulysses and Aeneas who visit the populated underworld as living men and return from it unchanged, and unlike, in theological terms, a deity such as Orpheus or a Christ figure who go to the underworld to conquer dying on behalf of others, Lazarus remains a mortal human, who was, or appeared to be, dead – suspended from life and light for a period of four days – and is returned to life as a man, not as a god/God/resurrected spirit.15 The Lazarean then can be understood as a unique human condition burdened by a solitary sojourn ‘outside the human world’ in a place and a state that the person carries within henceforth, set apart by this exceptionality from those s/he appears to rejoin.

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 99

Lazarus, Λαζαρος, is, however, the Hellenized Greek spelling of the Hebrew name Eleazar, ‫אלְ ﬠָ זָ ר‬, ֶ (alternative spelling Eliezer, as in the character in Elie Wiesel’s Night and the full version of that author’s given name). In Hebrew, however, Eleazar means ‘God Has Helped’: El’Azar. The name first appears in the Torah (Jewish scriptures) as the eldest son and successor of the first High Priest Aaron, brother of Moses. It then occurs in Greek, in the anonymous text of the Christian Gospel of John, Chapters 11–12, where the strange story is told of a man called Lazarus of Bethany. This town has no Hebrew or Jewish biblical origin but appears to be Greek. Bet means house in Hebrew, ania, suffering in Aramaic. There are many complexities to any biblical text and it is not my intention to examine those of the latest (in terms of composition) and the most anti-Judaic of the four gospels, the Gospel of John. What matters is the passage from Eleazar, ‘God has helped’, to the Greek Lazarus, whom it appears Jesus ‘helped’ by bringing him back from the (appearance of ) being dead. Lazarus is he who has been helped, by supernatural force, to pass into and return from the tomb. This is specific. He was not only dead, but buried. Beyond the theological origin, Lazarus is thus to be identified with the tomb, a specific place for/of the dead who are suspended between that encounter, a return and a final death. It is, perhaps, because I am an art historian that I see John’s Gospel text in terms of famous visual translations/interpretations, one of which occurs in an oil painting of The Raising of Lazarus by the Dutch Protestant painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606– 69), who imagined this story in paint on the cusp of a radical shift within Christian thinking from Catholicism and the miraculous to Protestantism and the metaphoric imaginary. In this oil painting, Rembrandt dramatized and rendered the Christ figure as the moment of command through the utterance (in a loud voice): ‘Lazarus! Come Forth.’ (‘Λάζαρε δεῦρο ἔξω’; literally: ‘Lazarus, now, outside!’). He does not say rise up but come out of the grave. The text then reads: ‘And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes; and his face was bound with a napkin. And Jesus said unto them: “Loose him and let him go”.’ (John 11: 43–44). Rembrandt heightens the ghastly effects of the yellow pallor of the bloodless corpse with the violet and silvery tints in the grave clothes. While the light from the outside world coming from the left warms and illuminates the sister Mary in her astonishment at Lazarus’s uncanny levitation and highlights the upraised gesture of command, the strained face of Jesus is painted without the warm flesh tones of the surrounding onlookers. It, too, is tinged with the pallor of death. Its features float in a loosely painted face, rendering it almost skeletal as well. In the biblical Christian narrative of the figure of Lazarus, the act of bringing this brother of Martha and Mary back from the dead, raising him from the tomb, occurs before the death of the incarnated deity. Theologically, it is only such a death that can conquer all death (human mortality created, in Christian readings, by the fall into mortality through original sin) and ensure resurrection or a possibility of resurrection for the faithful. So it is important to point out that, while for Christian thought the tripartite process of crucifixion, entombment and resurrection of the Jesus figure is

100 | griselda pollock

Figure 2.1. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), The Raising of Lazarus, c. 1630, oil on panel, 37.9 × 32 in., 94.77 × 81.28 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Gift of H.F. Ahmanson and Company, in memory of Howard F. Ahmanson (M.72.67.2). © 2017 Digital Image Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence.

the central transformation of the human condition fated since the fall in the Garden of Eden to shamed mortality, the inserted story of Lazarus in John’s Gospel remains a problem precisely because the key transformation, a sacrificial death of the incarnated deity that produces the idea of the victory over mortality and the possibility of eternal life, has not yet happened.

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 101

Figure 2.2. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), The Raising of Lazarus, 1632, etching, 14.5 × 10.2 in., 36.5 × 25.6 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-596.

102 | griselda pollock

Rembrandt made a large etched version of this theme in 1632, which, however, repositions the viewer inside the cave-tomb, looking on from behind the commanding figure of Jesus. The image thus establishes two axes: inside/outside and darkness/ light. The etching formally installs the metaphorical equation in Protestant theology between light and resurrection, hence divinity as light/life. Thus, in Rembrandt’s print, what is important is that Lazarus is shown being awakened but still wrapped in his burial clothes; however much a certain power of light conquering darkness is represented by the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s medium, suggesting the potential power of this Christ figure to disperse the darkness of the tomb, Lazarus is not a pre-figuration of the sacrificial Messiah/Christ who will triumphantly rise in glorious beauty and return to a celestial, spiritual home, freed from the mortal claims of the body. Lazarus is mortal and remains forever the body wrapped in his shroud. It is from a photographed copy he owned of Rembrandt’s etching that the modern Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) made a painting, two centuries later in 1890, as his major statement about modern art.16 He expunged from the Rembrandt source all the onlookers save the two sisters, giving the astonished Mary the features of his sister, Wilhemina, while his own features appear on the deathly face of Lazarus. The Christ figure disappears, replaced by the thickly impastoed disk of the

Figure 2.3. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt), May 1890, oil on paper, 20 × 25.8 in., 50 × 65.5 cm. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. © Van Gogh Stichtung, Amsterdam.

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 103

massive, yellow sun illuminating the landscape beyond the tomb in the foreground. Van Gogh retained, however, three elements: the cave, the stone and the sense of entombment. Without the embodiment of the command to come forth, light merely becomes a pantheistic force, unable to effect the raising of the dead, but leaving the artist identified with the semi-levitated figure in grave clothes, lying forever suspended between two states as a signifier of the psychological condition of which this borrowed and revised imagery becomes a portrait. By excising all reference to the supernatural, Van Gogh makes a modern translation of Lazarus, identifying self and artist with the subjective condition of living death and social isolation from which a person may need to be rescued, but in which there is no divine rescuer: no God to help, no El’Azar. It is possible that Cayrol was aware of Van Gogh’s painting, as well as the older visual representations in Italian or Dutch religious art. Van Gogh’s canvas had been twice exhibited in Paris during the 1930s. Cayrol’s later collaborator, Alain Resnais, certainly knew well the work of Van Gogh and was aware, if not party to, the mythic interpretation of the Dutchman as isolated social exile invented by writings on the artist by a French symbolist author as early as 1890.17 One of Resnais’s films about modern artists focused on Van Gogh. First made as a silent film in 16mm in 1947 in response to a major post-war exhibition of the Dutch artist’s works at the Orangerie in Paris in 1947, and then remade in 35mm in 1948 with sound (17 minutes, black and white) with a voiceover text written by art historian Gaston Diehl (1912–99), a major figure in cultural resistance during the war who defended modern art against German fascist aesthetics, and with music composed specially by Jacques Besse (1921–99), Van Gogh won Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1948.18 Resnais did not include the Lazarus painting but his film concluded with Van Gogh’s Wheatfields with Crows (July, 1890 Van Gogh

Figure 2.4. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Wheatfields with Crows, July 1890, oil on canvas, 20 × 39.5 in., 50.5 × 102 cm. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. © Van Gogh Stichtung, Amsterdam.

104 | griselda pollock

Museum, Amsterdam), a painting that was at the time generally interpreted as Van Gogh’s suicide note. (It was also shown in Paris in 1947.) Writing on the relations between Paul Celan, Van Gogh, Cayrol and Resnais in relation to Resnais’s film, Night and Fog (1955), Eric Kligerman has suggested a specific resonance between the opening scene of Resnais’s film and Van Gogh’s painting of wheat fields heavy with avian menace. Even though the unsettling proximity of an apparently peaceful rural scene of everyday agricultural life to the interior of the camp is the purpose of Resnais’s opening camerawork, Kligerman highlights the link in Cayrol’s opening words: ‘Even a tranquil landscape, even a meadow with crows, a wheat harvest or haystacks . . . can lead directly to a concentration camp’ (Figure 2.5).19 A deadlier connection is underlined in Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan’s German translation of Cayrol’s text for Resnais’s films, Celan having dedicated several poems to Van Gogh’s painting of a landscape of wheat fields menaced by black birds. Cayrol’s original mentions crows (corbeaux), while Celan uses the more menacing Raben (ravens) to rhyme with Graben, graves, used throughout his poem Death Fugue, written in 1945 and published in 1948. Rembrandt’s and Van Gogh’s Protestant visual references to the Lazarean predate the moment of the concentrationary universe and its anti-resurrection rewriting of the trope in post-concentrationary literature. My discussion had to pass through the

Figure 2.5. Opening scene of a harvested meadow with crows, Nuit et brouilllard, 1955 (Dir. Alain Resnais, Argos Films, France, 32 mins.). DVD screen capture.

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 105

visual images, however, because I want to identify in Rembrandt’s etching a key element carried into Van Gogh and via Van Gogh to Resnais, Cayrol and Celan, namely the Lazarean trope of the tomb.

Lazarus: The Tomb and the Gaze ‘after Auschwitz’, Mauthausen and Buchenwald The tomb is the image of a place, cold, dark, lonely, enclosed, in which the wrapped body of the recently deceased is placed, traditionally ‘dressed’ in a shroud, face covered, effaced. Is the tomb the condition that the alive/sick/dead/re-enlivened Lazarus/ Eleazar endured – if only for four days in the Gospel of John – a condition of total separation from the communities of the everyday and humanizing social life itself, the condition for which Cayrol borrowed this biblical figure as the only one that might capture what it means to bring being psychically dead through the extremity of physical torture back with you to a world that cannot know the place where you were inhumanly robbed in a profound way of what constitutes a human sense of self and body? At the heart of this appropriated emblem for an incommunicable experience of the mid-twentieth-century concentrationary universe, we find not only a proximity to the materiality of death in the senseless and cruel de-individuated killing of millions but to the perpetual threat of a non-human effacement from life, an effacement of your own singular death, delayed but ever-threatened, and thus a new kind of existence with death already embedded within, almost coterminous with – under the skin, in the nostrils – of a kind of living being not known before in history. Also condemned to concentrationary slave labour in the industrial chemical factory of I G Farben known as Auschwitz III, Jewish writer Primo Levi wrote of the horror of watching others’ descent into the condition of becoming a living corpse, a condition that was named by Auschwitz slang Muselmann – because of the swaying of weakened muscles and the constant collapsing to the ground in extreme malnutrition. This inevitable slide into dehumanized death by emaciation and starvation had to be resisted by any means possible.20 Cayrol, however, had turned to a Catholic imaginary to evoke, through the Lazarean figure, a hitherto unarticulated and historically unimaginable psychological place. Unlike Levi, who wrote from the position of observing the feared and resisted condition of the Muselmann other, Cayrol writes of the ever-inescapable space he finds within himself. He reported: In 1946 it was a strange period for my writing. I was totally impregnated by this other place to which the concentrationary had brought me: a curious pallor invaded my days and years . . . I remained in this air pocket which was the legacy of the camp at Gusen, a kind of blackboard on which everything had been erased. I felt myself to be a wandering Lazarus who would have touched too often the stone at the mouth of tomb.21 (my emphases)

106 | griselda pollock

Contact with the concentrationary impregnates or invades. Painfully, Cayrol has used a term that normally would suggest a new life implanted in a maternal body. In this context, however, the forced entry might also imply a kind of rape, a planting not of life but of death within. ‘He’ is now carrying within his psychic but also physical womb ‘another place’ characterized by pallor, the sign of bloodless deadliness, blocked by the stone that will never be rolled away to expose the luminous, resurrected divinity. Instead, it leaves an indelible imprint on a death-contaminated corpse that knows forever its amalgamation with the tomb-world. Cayrol’s non-being is also trapped in an air pocket from which his past and memories are erased. They are rubbed out like chalk on a now-blank blackboard. Yet he wanders in this darkness, a Lazarus endlessly too close to, still in contact with, the stone that seals the tomb. It has not rolled back to allow a return to life. It is a contact that is ineluctable. It (dis)colours him. The wandering Lazarean signifies a human subjectivity already immersed in deadliness in all its physicality, stink, abjection, and physical pain but also, and acutely, in an interiorized psychological alienation in self-horror that severs the possibility of return as resurrection. To survive is not to return to the world and life, but to trail the sensorium of never-to-be escaped entanglement in a shroud of filth, pain, torture, humiliation and shame, and to be sentenced to live within it despite (ever-falsifying) appearances of resuscitation.

The Gaze of the Lazarean Concentrationee In my earlier work on the overall problematic of ‘looking back’ at images of historical events of horror and suffering from photography and film made at the time, often by perpetrators of the atrocity, I have argued that an Orphic gaze – Orpheus looked back at the dead Eurydice he was leading from the underworld and killed her a second time – risks killing again and again.22 The visual track of Alain Resnais’s inevitably scopic film, Nuit et brouillard (1955) negotiated such a risk, given the necessity to draw on such imagery and footage to construct the political narrative of his political indictment of the concentrationary system, while disturbing the normal sense of time past and present. He did so by the radical gesture of suturing the stark horror of the black and white historical image archive with the coloured familiarity of the current everyday, itself made eerie with perpetual menace.23 The oscillating images of past and present were not only anchored, but also politically freighted, by the terse poetics of Cayrol’s commentary, spoken by a French actor Michel Bouquet with minimal affectivity. Thus camps, built immediately in 1933 at the very start of the Nazi regime, are exposed as the core instrument of a political experiment in total domination, constructed on and systemically effecting the novel project of dehumanization, alongside the unprecedented project of racialized mass murder minuted as policy on 20 January 1942 by the Wannsee Protocol.24 Hence, any mode of concentrationary art – art as

The Perpetual Anxiety of Lazarus

| 107

resistance, warning, and agitating remembrance – would have to focus on two related elements. The first is an emblematic figure for this new condition of a dehumanized-once-human being created by the camp – the concentrationee. The second is the challenge of conveying the meaning of that exiled ‘being’ (using the Derridean device of ‘under erasure’) for the world to which those returned but where, in some critical sense do not, they cannot be said to, live. How do these beings look at the world to which they might return? There is a widely distributed and now famous news photograph by American photographer Margaret Bourke-White made in April 1945 (but only published in Life in 1960) of freed prisoners at Buchenwald, still dressed in their striped uniforms, standing behind barbed wire, looking out. Garnered from Soviet newsreels, Resnais concluded his film with a similar image of a group of prisoners behind the barbed wire. This shot reverse-rhymes with two opening shots of a rural landscape filmed by a camera appearing to be outside the camp (Figure 2.5). The camera then pans and tilts to reveal that it is, in fact, already inside the camp, looking out from behind the wire. By the end of the film, the viewer is not visiting the abandoned, empty camp, but confronting the survivors from this other planet that the film has anatomized cinematically over 30 minutes, reassembling its pictorial fragments to summon up the

Figure 2.6.  ‘Are they freed? Will everyday life recognize [reconnaît in the original French voiceover] them again?’ (survivors behind barbed wire), Nuit et brouilllard, 1955 (Dir. Alain Resnais, Argos Films, France, 32 mins.). DVD screen capture.

108 | griselda pollock

concentrationary universe these men now carry back across the wire into the world we inhabit. Cayrol’s text says over them: The deportees look out without understanding. Are they freed? Will everyday life recognize them? 25

Wiesel and the Gaze from the Tomb At this point I want to bring into conversation with Cayrol’s writings and these images a passage from Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, written in 1954 and first published in Yiddish, and then in a reduced French version in 1958, these dates being those between which Cayrol collaborated with Resnais on Nuit et brouillard. I want to make a string vibrate between Cayrol’s concentrationary experience and a moment in Jewish survivor Elie Wiesel’s narrative of his journey from concentrationary existence in Auschwitz III (known as Monowitz, an industrial slave labour camp run by I G Farben) to the German concentration camp of Buchenwald, outside Weimar in January 1945. With his father, and like Primo Levi, Jean Améry and other later writers who also created this canon of Holocaust testimonial literature, Elie Wiesel was selected from the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau to be sent as a slave labourer to the I G Farben Buna rubber works known as Auschwitz III-Monowitz (it opened in April 1941). It is thought that 35,000 prisoners were sent to Auschwitz III; 25,000 had died there by 1945. It is in this condition that Wiesel, Levi and Améry entered into a concentrationary universe to whose agony they gave their own literary testimony and poetic figuration, always under a different shadow of witnessed and anticipated racial murder. The concentrationary universe of Auschwitz III-Monowitz was part of an overlapping regime across the Auschwitz complex (three main camps I, II and III and 44 subcamps) with the exterminatory German death factories of the Third Reich situated in Poland. It exhibited distinctive features that some survivors of the concentration camps anatomized as a core structural instrument of totalitarianism: the attempt at total domination based on the systematic dehumanization of the living, which effectively produces a permanent occupation of the self by a deadness of which the person, if s/he survived its regime, was abjectly conscious forever. For reasons of the complex collision in a small number of Jewish people’s experiences of the concentrationary and the exterminatory, Wiesel’s story will shift the political aesthetics of figuration of unmournable loss to the figure of the Jewish survivor. In Holocaust memory, the survivor, however, is at once and cannot be, a witness; testimony has become the anxious form of this paradox. A Jewish survivor of what he himself names the ‘concentrationary universe’, Primo Levi, affirms this when he writes: We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, including myself, when I re-read my writings after a

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 109

lapse of years. We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned mute.26 Thus, as Primo Levi attests, testimony has become a shameful form. The writings of Elie Wiesel were, never like those of Primo Levi, measured attempts to identify the system of this universe and Jewish precarity within it. Night is at once rageous and intensely personal yet written in the narrative tradition of Jewish storytelling of the Chasidic community from which the fifteen-year-old Eliezer who narrates Night was violently wrenched. The teenage boy, Eliezer Wiesel, had been selected from the racialized deportation and mass murder of Hungarian Jewry in Auschwitz, following the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Under Eichmann’s direct management, between 15 May and 9 July 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jewish men, women and children were deported to, and the majority gassed on arrival at, Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It is thought that 20 percent of the men between 16 and 50 and some women from these transports (late in the war) may have been selected for slave labour. Wiesel’s experience, later recounted in novels, autobiographical writings and speeches, is thus a fundamental part of the corpus of the literature of the Shoah. He witnessed the transportation and immediate destruction of over 400,000 people, including his mother and sister. In 1954, on board a ship to Brazil, Elie Wiesel composed an angry and explicit 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences of deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It was addressed to the world its author condemned. This massive tome was then reduced to 284 pages in a published version as Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). In 1955, for a French translation of what appears to have been intermediate translations into Hebrew, Wiesel found a publisher at Les Éditions de Minuit, Samuel Beckett’s French publishing house where Jérome Lindon radically edited the long manuscript down to 178 pages. These appeared as La Nuit [The Night] in 1958. In 1960 an English translation of a 116-page version was published in New York, translated by Stella Rodway simply as Night. ‘The night’ refers to Wiesel’s powerful statement referring to the night he and his family arrived at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Laid out like a prose poem it begins ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp. That turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.’27 Generalizing the work as ‘night’ – in the English titling – moves the reader to a more metaphorical plane. Undergoing translation from language to language, from volume to volume, Wiesel’s now famous text arrives with us as a poetic distillation that has become as sharp as shards of broken glass, as piercing as the points of twisted metal on barbed wire, and as vivid in its scene setting and dialogue as any mute, expressionist film. By the time of his death in 2014, Wiesel was the internationally known spokesperson of Jewish suffering during the Shoah. Yet some aspects of the poetics of Night

110 | griselda pollock

are, I am suggesting, available for a supplementary and transformed Lazarean reading that does not compromise Night as a central text of Jewish Holocaust literature. My reading draws out the dimension we are seeking here to add to our readings of texts from a moment in twentieth century history that not only bear witness to genocidal horror but also function politically as responses, by means of aesthetic resistance, to the novel conditions of both dehumanized life and dehumanized death that are the long-lasting and ever-present effects of, and potentials within, a ‘concentration-camp society’.28 Without displacing the event to which this book is powerful testimony, this episode makes possible a differentiated, Jewish sense of the Lazarean, not as a character in a Christian story, but as a literary figure who is the witness to and of death in the novel condition that Cayrol marked out as the horrifying state of the survivor, moving paradoxically ‘from death to life’.29 I suggest we can find a figurative image of the Lazarean in the passage with which the French and English versions of Wiesel’s Night end. With the liberation of Buchenwald by American forces, and prisoners falling ravenously upon the liberated provisions, Eliezer becomes sick with food poisoning. He enters the hospital and lies there for two weeks. One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the wall opposite. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.30 Let us pause to look at the construction of that sentence. Mirrors are flat; they have no depth. Yet in the illusory space of the silvered surface, Eliezer falls into another space, and meets an other, defined as already dead, a corpse from this deep place, a dead thing, who nonetheless looks back at Eliezer with its penetrating gaze, a gaze which the author is now telling his reader accompanies him thereafter. In his book L’Espèce humaine (1957), translated as The Human Race, French deportee to slave labour camps and later Buchenwald inmate, Robert Antelme, also discusses the issues of a mirror and the confrontation with his own face. One of his colleagues has found a shard of mirror from the bombardment of Buchenwald. The men ask to borrow it. Antelme remarks that the shock was to see that he had a face; prisoners were not seen by the SS and, out of self-protection, they tried to offer no face to the SS. ‘The mask of a human being – our face – had become absent from our life . . . our life had become an absence.’31 In Night, split at the surface of the mirror, the re-enlivened survivor, Eliezer, meets his still dead avatar through a gaze that is alienated from him, looking at him from the other place. Yet, is also projected into the mirror from within him. Wiesel’s sentence linguistically performs a radical split within Wiesel who expected to meet, in the mirror, a remembered even if altered self. Instead, in its depths, he found something terrifying. A corpse looks back at him. From where? Corpses lie in tombs. In depths. Worse, the corpse inhabits him thereafter.

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 111

The image of this dead self has never left him. Where is it? Is it the look in his own eyes when he confronts himself in the mirror that cannot be integrated into what Lacan theorized as the imago, the imaginary figuration of an ego that forms the basis of our primordial identification as a self-contained human subject via an ideal image discovered in the mirror?32 Or is it the self radically transformed because he has come from the place of endlessly being dead? Does some element of a gaze traverse the space of death to transmit the experience of seeming alive while carrying being already dead in an existential if not a physical sense within? Does this text create a figuration of the concentrationary as tomb, of a concentrationee non-being that is now within, merged with him, like the stink of Lazarus, even when not looking in the mirror, but looking out, both with and as him, upon the world to which he has been uncomprehendingly returned in a sentence without end? In his troublingly resurrectionist Christian preface to the French and English editions of the French publication of Night, the Catholic writer François Mauriac comments on his own encounter with a ‘young Jew’, Eliezer Wiesel, noting what struck him about the author who offers to him ‘the gaze of a Lazarus risen from the dead yet still held captive in the sombre regions into which he had strayed, stumbling over desecrated corpses.’33 In its initial articulation, the Lazarean refers to the subjective condition of those who have passed through a form of death that leaves them both alive and dead; their humanity has been pressed to a point of being destroyed while they have not been allowed a human death. They are brought back from this elsewhere they have seen and suffered. Such men and women are forced to return from this other space to the land of the uncomprehending living. But, as political deportee to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück survivor Charlotte Delbo insisted in her concentrationary writing: ‘none of us will return’.34 Liberation from the camps is not resurrection; the prisoners are in effect brought back with their shroud, their deadliness clinging to them, ever co-present in all its vividness. Writing in Days and Memory, published posthumously in 1985 in French, Delbo drew on the metaphor of a snake shedding its skin to describe an apparent physical recovery from the filth and ill health inflicted during her time in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. She doubted, however, the idea that having shed this skin, it was the same old snake:35 How does one rid oneself of something buried far within: memory and the skin of memory. It clings to me yet. Memory’s skin has hardened, it allows nothing to filter out of what it retains, and I have no control over it . . .36 (My emphasis) Delbo then identifies what lies embedded beneath this hard skin of memory: ‘Deep memory preserves sensations, physical imprints. It is the memory of the senses.’37 In these secularized and political appropriations of the Lazarean in the midtwentieth century to articulate a subjective condition, Lazarean art becomes an art to which this particular deathliness continues to cling, and from which a revenant

112 | griselda pollock

speaks to a world that is, however, not entirely a world apart. That world must know about this menacing possibility of not only a proximity to death that does not yield to the resurrectionist Christian hope but a condition that cannot be thrown off. It sticks to a body that knows the stink of its own abjection, the physical immersion in death, its perpetual decay. The Lazarean is a way of describing the eternally imposed concentrationary condition which one might describe as not only immersive, permeating the very skin, being as it were inside in a way that is associated with oral ingestion and impregnation. It literally possesses and marks the embodied psyche. It would seem to me that Cayrol’s attempt to find terms in which to articulate the concentrationary condition picks up awkwardly but effectively on the peculiarity of the Lazarean as the only figure in any Western literature for symbolizing a condition of return that adamantly refuses the delusions of both transcendent resurrection and liberated, unmarked survival. Beyond figuring the condition of the subject, the concentrationee, this art also has seen in the camp both an aberration or perversion of society at its most sadistically uncontained. It witnesses the deeper logic of modern society itself, revealed there in ways invisible and veiled to the ordinary people outside its fences who are not thereby safe from that logic. Thus, at a second level, concentrationary art addresses a new political understanding of the continuities between the camp world and the society outside it that traverses the literature of the political deportees like Cayrol and Delbo and the Jewish survivors of the concentrationary universe such as Primo Levi, with his figure of the Muselmann and Elie Wiesel with his perpetual companion, a corpse within. The camp was the experimental laboratory of totalitarianism, a testing ground for total domination. The menace of its full-blown control of entire societies remains and has been enacted repeatedly across the world. Its political form – dictatorships, apartheid society, Stalinism – makes it most visible. What if there is deeper continuity with what is proclaimed as the liberal counterforce to totalitarianism, the Free World, modern capitalist society? What does analysis of concentrationary society tell us about the world beyond the barbed wire?

Political Analysis of the Economics of the Concentrationary in Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard In our book Concentrationary Cinema, Max Silverman and I have argued that Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard should be recognized more as a political analysis and indictment of concentrationary fascism than as a failed commemorative monument to the genocide of Jewish and Romani Europeans.38 Close historical study of the making and effect of the film reveals that it was informed by a political analysis of concentrationary deportation provided by returning French resistance prisoners, and by the literature of deportation, such as the texts by Cayrol but also by the Trotskyist David Rousset. As a leftist, anti-colonial filmmaker – Resnais was already politically outcast by the French government because of his film, made with Chris Marker, in 1953 that

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 113

denounced the effects of colonialism in Africa, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) – Resnais sought cinematically to produce a structural understanding of the concentrationary as a politico-economic system designed to eradicate humanity, but also a system already entangled in and enacting the deadly logic of a relentlessly exploitative and colonial capitalism.39 It seems that only during the course of research visits to Poland in 1955 did Resnais and his research team encounter for themselves the documentary and material evidence of the dedicated extermination processes that had taken place in Poland and traces of which at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Madjanek had been documented by Soviet forces, copies of whose newsreels and photographs were held in Poland on the Auschwitz sites and in Jewish archives. The film team then struggled to incorporate some of this new knowledge into their existing plan for a film initially devised around an already formulated national narrative of the deportation and return of French political resistance fighters from the camps of Germany and Austria. In her historical documentation and analysis of the making of Nuit et brouillard, film historian Sylvie Lindeperg identifies the many obstacles Resnais faced in accessing photographic or filmed materials held in official French, British and Soviet collections because of his leftist reputation and the recent banning of his anti-colonial film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953). She then makes clear the deranging impact of the visit to the Auschwitz complex itself and the exposure to what was held in Polish archives. These revelations shifted what had been initially a French-focussed story of political deportation and return from numerous and visible concentration camps in Germany to an additional awareness of the racialized extermination programme carried out secretly on Polish territory by the Germans against the Jewish and Roma Europeans alongside the concentrationary universe. This dimension was, however, only spectrally traced in the final film despite the presence of colour sequences of the cremation ovens at Madjanek and the final scene of the ruins of the exploded crematoria at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and the important tracking shot along the train lines that led to the ramp at Birkenau at the film’s centre. As a result of what he saw in Poland, Resnais wanted to acknowledge the genocide of Jewish and Roma Europeans more fully. It appears, however, that Cayrol refused to countenance Resnais’s addition of explicit reference to the ‘Final Solution’ that would specify Jewish victims of mass murder. All that remains in the film to witness this contest is one laconic phrase: ‘One must destroy, but productively’. It is spoken over the found footage of Heinrich Himmler’s visit to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942, when he met with engineers and other experts to plan the construction of the new murder factory at Birkenau. Not focussing on the process of mass murder itself, but through slow and prolonged tilting up over mountains of human remains and belongings (originating from the four extermination camps on Polish soil and stored in Madjanek and by 1955 kept in the Auschwitz Museum), Resnais’s film makes visible an important – and often overlooked – dimension of the SS operations, namely an economic logic within the racist annihilatory programme, which has since been

114 | griselda pollock

analysed by German scholars and the historian Michael Thad Allen who titled his book: The Business of Genocide.40 The SS had no budget for the Final Solution and had to finance its own deadly operations by commercially exploiting the remains of the people it destroyed. Resnais’s film thus exposes the horrendous connection between the regime’s murderous racism and the SS’s brutally economic programme for maximizing the return even from the corpses ‘produced’ by mass killing. Arendt herself stressed this dimension when she described the regime as building factories to produce corpses.41 The SS ruthlessly ‘harvested’ elements from their victims for blankets (cloth from women’s hair), soap and fertilizer (from bones and skin) while also working in alliance with the actual partnerships with capitalist industries such as I G Farben, which the SS provisioned (for a price) with cheap, disposable slave labour through the novel scheme, prompted by the industrialists, of selection on the ramps of Birkenau of potential workers (remembering that less than 1 percent of those arriving on those ramps were thus selected). In Resnais’s film the voiceover says: ‘Nothing was wasted. Here are the wartime stocks of the Nazis, their stores.’ (‘Tout est récupéré. Voici les reserves des Nazis en guerre, leurs greniers.’ Shot 247-8: 25’04”- 07”.) Minutes from a meeting of the production team for Resnais’s film, on 28 May 1955, reveals that when this new objective emerged into the director’s plans, it radically reshaped the form and hence the import of the film. That objective was presented as: ‘to explain clearly how the concentrationary system (its economic aspect) unfolds automatically from fascism.’42 The film is then to be understood as a political project of a different order. Neither commemorative nor museological, neither celebratory nor heroic, Resnais’s experience at Auschwitz and in Polish archives reset the film to be both analytical and monitory in a materialist perspective that is critical to the understanding of the French theories of the concentrationary as not only an extreme instance of totalitarian domination. It was also shown to be an extreme example symptomatic of a condition of contemporary socio-economic reality that under (a still colonial) capitalism was subjecting society itself to a concentrationary logic, penetrating deeply into the everyday and into the fabric of subjectivity within such societies – without any barbed wire enclosure. Hence the film not only engages with the Cayrolian sense that survivors are ‘Lazareans amongst us’, but it also argues that life in contemporary post-war society had become, in a profound way, structurally Lazarean on a less visible plane of daily attrition of humanity under the relentless economic logic of exploitation and profit. This concept of the insinuation of a concentrationary logic into everyday social experience in a society dedicated to exploitative utility of all labour, which produces its own affliction of the subject, is also present in the writing of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in 1949, as he critiques Existentialism’s radical failure to recognize it: At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the ‘concentrational ’ [concentrationnaire]

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

| 115

form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort, existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it: a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.’43 A concentrationary art thus has to craft a political aesthetics of disturbance to the veil of normality and resistance to its insinuation, thus troubling capitalist normalization and announcing what Cayrol, in defence of Resnais’s film in 1956, defined as a ‘dispositif d’alerte’ – a warning system. 44

Conclusion Instead of tracing a lineage, I have sought to identify the overdetermination of a poetics and its metaphors we find in the various forms of writing that struggled to give voice to the horrific novelty of having endured, and returned from, the concentrationary universe (which can include having been destined for, but temporarily suspended from, extermination). One of these is the troubling figure of the Lazarean, initially encountered in the Christian Gospels and articulated by a Catholic poet. Yet, as I have suggested, that figuration of the tomb-corpse-face without a specific naming also poetically haunts a text written by and of a Jewish survivor bearing that very name, Eliezer/Lazarus, who, from a Jewish tradition, and alienated from its religious consolations by his horrific initial encounter with Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, sought images and tropes through which to write an indictment of the world that let it happen. Can such a condition find its articulation or evocation in an aesthetic form, without betrayal of its incommunicability and undecidability between two conditions that appear to each other’s structural opposite: living/dead? In the evocation of his own post-liberation self as a death’s head rather than a known face, Wiesel crafts his own form of a Lazarean text. Between death and life and in a permanently undecidable condition, both survivor writers Cayrol and Wiesel speak to the world that needs to know of such things. While they themselves endured such things in their tortured bodies and agonized minds, they also have to make it known to those not taken into the hell of night and fog, behind barbed wires, which, seeming to mark a barrier between two worlds, are no such boundary. They imply that what they endured there is part of the here of contemporary society, in ways not as extreme in their physical terror, but as relentlessly gnawing at humanity’s humanness, even while it provides warm homes and almost sufficient food. Hence the necessity for a Lazarean literature speaking of the tomb of contemporary humanity from the extremity of tomb-world of a fascist-infected capitalist society at its most emblematic: the camp. What they encountered in the camps was not an amorphous

116 | griselda pollock

threat of death. It was what was written on their SS captors’ faces and marked by their emblem: the death’s head. They had seen not only the tomb-world but the death’s head as the sign of a society fashioned by the SS. Was it thus Wiesel’s own corpse that looked back at him from the mirror, or was it in part a face of one who feels the horror of having seen the faces of the men who had done it to him, and who dreaded the knowledge that such an encounter had altered him. The Lazarean gaze arose from an ineradicable trace of the encounter with the Gorgon of humanly enacted, systemic and economically calculated inhumanity that had been taken to the extreme of its logical possibility.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds. Reputed as an international, postcolonial, queer, feminist analyst of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she has recently been writing on trauma and the aesthetic in modern and contemporary art and film, drawing on Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula, and on the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism. Her related publications include After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester, 2013); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum and Wild Pansy Press, 2013); Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2014); Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2015); and the monograph, Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018), a study of the single monumental artwork, Life? or Theatre?, of a German-Jewish artist murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

Notes 1. H. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review XV (1948), 746. She is referring to the book by author and camp returnee D. Rousset, Les jours de notre mort (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1947). 2. The term is used by M.-L. Basuyaux, ‘Jean Cayrol et la collection Ecrire: de l’écriture blanche à l’écriture verte’, Fabula: La recherche en littérature (2007). 3. Wiesel’s book, Night, takes its title from the passage shortly after the arrival of Eliezer and his father mother and sister in Auschwitz. ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed’ and concludes ‘Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.’ E. Wiesel, Night [1958], trans. M. Wiesel (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 32. 4. The four dedicated death factories established after 1941 and operating until 1943 (Chelmno had a second phase of operation up to 1945) in Poland were for Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Chelmno. Sobibor and Treblinka were closed and erased from the earth in 1943 after revolts by the Sonderkommando. The Treblinka uprising occurred on 2 August 1943 and 300 prisoners escaped, of which 100 survived the subsequent manhunt. From the Sobibor uprising on 14 October 1943, 50 prisoners are thought to have survived the war, 300 having escaped to join the Partisans. Belzec was closed down in

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

| 117

December 1942 and all evidence erased, its surviving Sonderkommando set to Sobibor in June 1943. Its site was turned into a fake farm to disguise its former use. There were only two Jewish survivors alive to give share testimony with a post-war Polish commission on Nazi crimes in Poland. Only seven men survived Chelmno, five escaping in 1942 and one fifteen-year-old surviving the fatal bullet administered by the SS guards as the Russians advanced in January 1945. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946). Mauthausen was the hub of a group of camps in Upper Austria, situated near Linz. It operated from the spring of 1938 to May 1945. It was the largest slave-labour camp in the Third Reich with four large subcamps and 100 other satellite camps in the region. Prisoners were forced to work in the quarries and mines, the munitions and aircraft factories, often underground. At liberation there were 85,000 inmates and the death toll has been calculated between 123,000 and 320,000 over the entire system of camps. The inmates, designated for ‘extinction through labour’, were largely the intelligentsia and other educated resisters from conquered territories. Twelve major industrial companies used the slave labour provided by the SS, including Bayer and Daimler. Cayrol did not consider these recovered writings as poetry. The quoted comment was made on their belated publication in 1990, cited in translation in A. Nader, Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 25. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire was translated into English firstly as The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947) and then re-issued in 1951 as A World Apart. H. Arendt, ‘Social Sciences and Concentration Camps’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 12, No. 1 (January 1950), 58; reprinted in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, edited by J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 238. Arendt, ‘Social Sciences and Concentration Camps’, 59 and 239–40. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 755. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 756. H. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951). Hannah Arendt defines a specific process of dehumanization: the loss of juridical subjecthood when entering the camp without name or civil identity, family role etc; the loss of moral agency in the mad conditions of camp logics; the erasure of individuality, spontaneity and singularity as physical torture and starvation reduced the once human subject to a body driven to utter limits to maintain organic life even to the extent of its own consumption of its organs for energy, leading to a condition of the living corpse. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 752–59. Basuyaux, ‘Jean Cayrol et la collection Ecrire’. Basuyaux draws our attention to Maurice Blanchot’s counter-choice of the classical figure of Orpheus to introduce into post-war literature a sense of the proximity to the space of death, but she specifically locates a more profound resonance between Cayrol’s Lazarus and the biblical figure found in Charles Vildrac’s text Lazare (1946). She writes: ‘On observe dans le monologue de Vildrac des similitudes frappantes avec la conception du romanesque lazaréen: la modification du rapport aux objets, la lucidité déchirante de Lazare s’opposant à une somnolence générale, la conscience hypertrophiée de sa finitude, et le renversement final autour du motif de l’odeur qui imprègne Lazare. Lorsque Cayrol fait le choix de cette figure en 1949, elle n’est donc plus seulement un motif glorieux, Vildrac en a fait une figure de témoin chargé de dénoncer un certain état du monde.’ [Vildrac’s monologue bears striking similarities to the conception of the Lazarean novel: the changed the relation to objects, Lazarus’s heart-rending lucidity in contrast to his sense of a widespread somnolence, the hypertrophied consciousness of his mortality, and the final reversal through the motif of the stink that permeates Lazarus. When Cayrol chose this figure in 1949, it is no longer just a celebratory motif, for Vildrac had made Lazarus a witness who has to denounce the current state of the world. (My translation)]. Section 2. Numbered paragraph 27. The Gospel of John makes clear that the man’s sister thought Lazarus was dead because he was stinking already. Thinkers from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment and to Ernest Renan (La Vie de Jésus, 1863) have debated the question of this supernatural miracle, suggesting a variety of explanations instead such as a coma of some sort or a situation that enabled Jesus to provide the people with a miracle that they desired without in effect performing it.

118 | griselda pollock

16. For further analysis of this work, see G. Pollock, ‘On Not Seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the Landscape of Consolation 1888–90’, in R. Thomson (ed.) Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 81–118. 17. Van Gogh’s posthumous artistic identity was interpreted very differently in various European countries. The French reading was initiated by Symbolist poet Albert Aurier (1865–1892) in an essay titled ‘Les Isolés’ in Mercure de France (January1890), who defined him as an inspired outsider artist attached to a pantheistic belief in nature and sun worship. 18. S. Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 22–26. 19. E. Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). Cayrol’s ‘Même un paysage tranquille, même une prairie avec des vols de corbeaux, des moissons et des feux d’herbes . . .’ [Even a peaceful landscape, even a meadow in harvest with crows circling overhead and grass fires . . .] becomes Celan’s ‘Auch rühiges Land, Auch ein Feld mit ein paar Raben darüber, mit Getreidenhaufen und Erntefeuer.’ 20. The figure of the Muselmann appears in many texts. The most sustained examination of the figure in this literature is Giorgio Agamben’s study of Primo Levi’s writing, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 41–86. 21. ‘En 1946 ce fut une période étrange pour mes écrits. J’étais tout imprégné de cet au delà que m’avait apporté le concentrationnat: une curieuse pâleur envahissait mes années . . . Je demeurais dans ce trou d’air qu’avait laissé le camp de Gusen, comme une espèce de tableau noir sur lequel tout avait été effacé. Je me figurais être un Lazare errant qui aurait trop touché la Pierre’, cited in Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 121. 22. G. Pollock, ‘Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell; or a Second Look that Does not Kill’, in M. Seppäla (ed.), Doctor and Patient: Sergei Bukaev Afrika and Bracha Ettinger (Pori: Taide Museum, 1996), 126–62; G. Pollock, ‘The Grace of Catastrophe: Matrixial Time and Aesthetic Space Confront the Archive of Disaster’, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007), 171–198. 23. For my reading of this unevenness in Resnais’s film, see G. Pollock, ‘Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapó (1959)’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn, 2011), 258–301. 24. M. Roseman, The Wannsee Protocol and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (London: St Martin’s Press, 2001; London: Allen Lane, 2002). 25. Les deportés regardent sans comprendre. Sont ils délivrés? La vie quotidienne va-t-elle les reconnaître? (28:46–50”) 26. P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [1986], trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988), 63–4. 27. E. Wiesel, Night [1958], trans. M. Wiesel (London: Penguin Books: 2006). 28. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946), 251. Translated as The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), and reissued in 1951 as A World Apart. See also H. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps,’ 743–63. 29. J. Cayrol, ‘D’un romanesque concentrationnaire’, Esprit, no. 159, September 1949, 340–357; reappeared under the title ‘De la Mort à la vie’ when it was published to accompany Cayrol’s script for the film Nuit et brouillard: Commentaire (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 47–113. 30. Wiesel, Night, 115. 31. R. Antelme, The Human Race [1957], trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press, 1992), 52–3. 32. J. Lacan ‘The Mirror Phase as formative of the function of the “I” in psychoanalytic experience’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 1–7. It was also printed as ‘The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I: 1949’, New Left Review, no. 51(1968), 71–77. 33. F. Mauriac, ‘Foreword’, Night, xix–xx. 34. C. Delbo, ‘None of Us Will Return’, Auschwitz and After vol. 1, trans. R. Lamont (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). The issue of a return that is a non-return also informs Cayrol’s

the perpetual anxiety of lazarus

35. 36. 37. 38.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

| 119

screenplay for his second film with Alain Resnais, Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963). It relates to memories of complicity with torture during the Algerian War. ‘Debarrassé de sa peau morte, le serpent n’a pas changé. Moin non plus, en apparence. Reste que.’ C. Delbo, La Mémoire et les jours (Paris: Berg International, 1995), 11. C. Delbo, Days and Memory [1985], trans. R. Lamont (Marlboro; The Marlboro Press, 1990), 1. Delbo, Days and Memory, 3. G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn, 2011). We drew on the work of Sylvie Lindeperg who has written: ‘Night and Fog made a decisive contribution to the way we regard the concentration camp system, while apprehensively inventing a gesture of cinema in order to face it. . . . By assembling archival footage – some of it known, some of it revealed to French audiences for the first time – Resnais shaped our images of the camps.’ S. Lindeperg, ‘Night and Fog: Inventing a Perspective’, in J.-M. Frodon (ed.), Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, trans. A. Harrison and T. Maes (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 63. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire. For a detailed historical documentation and analysis of the making of this film, see S. Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007). M. T. Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labour and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). His argument is contested by the earlier works of J. E. Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: Das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS (Schöningh, 2000) and E. Georg, Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS (Stuttgart: DVA, 1963 and Oldenburg: Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010). H. Arendt, Letter to Karl Jaspers, 17 December 1947 in L. Kohler and H. Saner (eds), Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969, trans. R. Kimber and R. Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 69. Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 74: ‘expliquer clairement comment le système concentrationnaire (dans son aspect économique) découle automatiquement du fascisme.’ J. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Phase as formative of the function of the “I” in psychoanalytic experience’. This is explored more fully in G. Pollock, ‘Introduction: A Concentrationary Imaginary?’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2015), 1–46. J. Cayrol, ‘Nous avons conçu “Nuit et brouillard’ comme un dispositive d’alerte’, Les Lettres Françaises, no. 606, 9 February 1956.

Bibliography Agamben, G. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Allen, M. T., The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Arendt, H. ‘The Concentration Camps,’ Partisan Review, XV:7 (July, 1948), 743–63. ———. ‘Social Sciences and Concentration Camps’, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 1950), reprinted in J. Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1994, 232–47. ———. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1951. Antelme, R. The Human Race [1957], trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press, 1992. Aurier, A. ‘Les Isolés’, Mercure de France, January 1890, 24–29. Basuyaux, M.-L. Témoigner clandestinement – Les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol. Paris: Garnier Classiques, 2010. ———. ‘Jean Cayrol et la collection Ecrire: de l’écriture blanche à l’écriture verte’, Fabula: La recherche en littérature (2007). Accessed 10 August 2017 from www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Jean_Cayrol_et_ la_collection_Ecrire.

120 | griselda pollock

———. ‘Les années 1950: Jean Cayrol et la figure de Lazare’, Fabula: Les colloques. Accessed 9 January 2016 from www.fabula.org/colloques/document61.php. Cayrol, J. ‘Nous avons conçu “Nuit et brouillard” comme un dispositive d’alerte’, Les Lettres Françaises, no. 606, 9 February 1956. ———. ‘De la mort à la vie’ in Nuit et brouillard: Commentaire. Paris: Fayard, 1997, 47–113. Delbo, C. La mémoire et les jours. Paris: Berg International, 1995; Days and Memory [1985] trans. R. Lamont. Marlboro: The Marlboro Press, 1990. ———. ‘None of Us Will Return’, Vol. 1 of Auschwitz and After, trans. R. Lamont. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Jacobs, S. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Kligerman, E. Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Kohler, L. and H. Saner (eds). Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969, trans. by R. Kimber and R. Kimber. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Lacan, J. ‘The Mirror Phase as formative of the function of the “I” in psychoanalytic experience’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977, 1–7. It was also printed as ‘The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I: 1949’, New Left Review, no. 51 (1968), 71–77. Levi, P. The Drowned and the Saved, [1986] trans. R. Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 1988. Levinas, E. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Lindeperg, S. Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007. ———. ‘Night and Fog: Inventing a Perspective’, in Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, J.-M. Frodon (ed.), trans. A. Harrison and T. Maes. New York: SUNY Press, 2010, 63–84. McCann, G. ‘Introduction’, in T. Adorno and M. Eisler (eds), Composing for the Films. London: Continuum Press, 2010, vii–xxxi Mintert, D. M. Das frühe Konzentrationslager Kemna und das sozialistische Milieu im Bergischen Land. Ruhr University Bochum, doctoral dissertation, 2007. Nader, A. Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. Pollock, G. ‘Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell; or a Second Look that Does not Kill’, in M. Seppäla (ed.), Doctor and Patient: Sergei Bukaev Afrika and Bracha Ettinger. Pori: Taide Museum, 1996, 126–62. ———. ‘On Not Seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the Landscape of Consolation 1888-90’, in R. Thomson (ed.) Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France 1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, 81–118. ———. ‘The Grace of Catastrophe: Matrixial Time and Aesthetic Space Confront the Archive of Disaster’, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. London: Routledge, 2007, 171–198. ———. ‘Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapó (1959)’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. London and New York: Berghahn, 2011, 258–301. ———. ‘Introduction’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, 1–46. Pollock, G. and M. Silverman, eds. Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. London and New York: Berghahn, 2011. Roseman, M. The Wannsee Protocol and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration. London: St. Martin’s Press, 2001; London: Allen Lane, 2002. Rousset, D. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions de Pavois, 1946. ———. The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. ———. Les jours de notre mort. Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1947. Schulter, J. E. Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: Das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS. Schöningh, 2000. Wiesel, Eli. Night [1958], trans. M. Wiesel. London: Penguin Book, 2006.

Part III

Reading with the Lazarean

CHAPTER 3

Concentrationary Art and the Reading of Everyday Life (in)human spaces in chantal akerman’s jeanne dielman, , quai du commerce,  bruxelles () Max Silverman

The problem is not to invent space, even less to re-invent it . . . but rather to interrogate it, or, to put it even more simply, to read it. For what we call the everyday is not clear and obvious but opaque, a form of blindness or anaesthesia. —Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces, back cover1 The works of the French writer Georges Perec could be described as a sustained interrogation or reading of everyday life. When tracing the lineage of those who preceded Perec in a similar encounter with the everyday, the roll-call (at least in French Studies) often starts with the nineteenth century poet Baudelaire and takes in Apollinaire, Surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes, amongst others – and then includes Michel de Certeau and other more recent city strollers and ludic re-enchanters of the banal. The list of writers on the everyday does not normally include Jean Cayrol, while, similarly, critics who deal with Cayrol do not situate him within theories of the everyday, even if they often recognize the influence of Surrealism on his work. This might seem surprising given that, in the postwar period, Lefebvre, Blanchot, Barthes, Perec and many others developing a new understanding of the quotidian in new consumer society were indebted to Cayrol’s

124 | max silverman

ideas (and often, patronage) and also make the links themselves between everyday life and the concentrationary universe. In this chapter I will consider some of the links between the concentrationary and the everyday in the post-war period in France and explore these in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by the Belgian film director Chantal Akerman. I will argue, first, that Cayrol’s concept of concentrationary art grows, in part, out of the literary and critical tradition of reading the everyday in the city. Reciprocally, a recognition of the importance of concentrationary art to the tradition of reading the everyday can give us a new way of understanding everyday life in post-war culture, not only in terms of the Surrealists’ rediscovery of ‘le merveilleux’ but also in terms of the hidden presence of the concentrationary. In the second part of the chapter I suggest that Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman can be read as a work of concentrationary cinema. My argument will focus, in particular, on how normalized concepts of city space, objects and the body are interrupted through the allusive presence of a traumatic past that haunts the banal nature of post-war bourgeois everyday life.

The Concentrationary Universe, the City and Everyday Life No French post-war theorist did more to develop a reading of everyday life than Henri Lefebvre. Through a number of works from the immediate post-war period until the 1960s,2 Lefebvre shaped a study that would influence urban sociologists, social psychologists, linguists, cultural critics and others in their analyses of post-war capitalist social and cultural practices. Yet the fact that the experience of the concentration camps provided the major impetus for his approach to the everyday is rarely highlighted. In his excellent book on everyday life, Michael Sheringham provides this missing link. Writing about Lefebvre’s first Critique de la vie quotidienne published in 1947 (though written in 1945), Sheringham observes that ‘[i]ts central message was the pressing need, at a time of national renewal, and in the context of first-hand accounts of the Nazi death camps, for a rehabilitation of everyday life as the essential ground of human existence’.3 Sheringham is referring specifically to those pages at the end of the first Critique where Lefebvre discusses the link between the experience of the camps and the rationalization of human relations in the modern city. Here, Lefebvre criticizes what he sees as David Rousset’s failure to comprehend fully the co-existence of the concentrationary universe and the ‘normal’ world in his post-war writings (which is, I believe, a misconstrual of Rousset’s analysis) in order to argue, instead, that ‘the concentration camp is the most extreme and paroxysmal form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town’.4 Using a broadly Marxist approach on mystification and alienation, but also influenced by Surrealism’s challenge to the shackles imposed on human freedom and imagination by rationalizing modernity and bourgeois complacency, Lefebvre suggests that we must see through the illusion that depicts the camp and the modern housing estate as opposites. The abstract ratio-

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 125

nality that constructs them in dualistic terms should, he says, be known instead for what it really is – ‘scientific barbarity’: Hidden beneath what appears to be human reason lies an irrational reality but lying even more deeply hidden beneath what appears to be absurd is a dehumanized Rationality . . . All or nearly all accounts of the ‘universe of the concentration camp’ are reminiscent of the strange universe of Kafka . . . Kafka’s ‘universe’ is not and is not intended to be extraordinary, nor does it aspire to be a universe it is everyday life – or Kafka’s view of it – meticulously described and captured in its essence. . . . The essential thing is that the everyday life of the ‘modern’ man in modern towns and on industrial housing estates (and above all the life of the ordinary man, the poor man, the worker like K . . . in the Castle) is tragically controlled by unresolved contradictions and by the most painful contradiction of all that between absurdity and Reason, both equally inhuman, both indivisibly united. And if we are to understand the everyday universe of the modern man, surely we must abandon the illusions created by moral doctrines, together with the illusions – which form such a thick screen between consciousness and the real – of a beneficial Reason and a fully realized individuality.’5 The two essays that Jean Cayrol republished in Lazare parmi nous, but which first appeared in the years immediately following the publication of Lefebvre’s book, share a number of the features of Lefebvre’s analysis of everyday life. Both refer to Rousset’s discussion of the relations between the concentrationary universe and the ‘normal’ world to argue that the camp and everyday life are on the same continuum rather than universes apart; both suggest (in Gramscian fashion) that surface ‘reality’, and the common-sense reason that underpins it, is an illusion that must be demystified to show the hidden content in everyday life. Both, then, create a new sort of realism in which the familiar world and its disfigured double coexist in uncanny fashion (and both, unsurprisingly, refer to Kafka as a literary example of this). Finally, both are ultimately concerned with human freedom and suggest that the path towards it must be founded on the recognition of the contamination of everyday life by an alienating concentrationary logic. The everyday, then, is the central site on which the struggle between oppression and freedom is played out and requires a critique (an art) of demystification and defamiliarization to render this visible. In the introduction to this volume I suggested that the post-war critique in France of modern consumer capitalism, across different disciplines and cultural practices (urban sociology, social psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, film), frequently adopted a similar perspective on the concentrationary presence in everyday life. The idea of the ‘concentrationary’ was thus extended to refer not only to the dehumanization carried out in the camps themselves but to a new social, economic and cultural reality. The brutalist architecture of the new social housing

126 | max silverman

projects in the big cities, the commodification of domestic space and the rationalization of human relations through new technologies were major features of what was named by some as the new ‘concentrationnat’ in the 1960s. This was associated especially with urbanization and its oppressive regulation of space by those seeking to open up ‘habitable’ spaces (for example, in critical theory, Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; in culture, Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles images (1966), Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), and so on). In revisiting his thesis on ‘the society of specatcle’ (‘la société du spectacle’) of the 1960s, Debord defines the systemic nature of the commodification of human relations in modern capitalist society as ‘concentrated spectacle’ (‘le spectacle concentré’).6 Jean-Louis Déotte draws a direct parallel between the Situationists’ characterization of alienation in the form of ‘la société du spectacle’ and the Lazarean and suggests that ‘Debord is a Lazarean writer’.7 In his ‘Comments against Urbanism’, Debord’s fellow Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, echoing Lefebvre, wrote the immortal line, ‘If the Nazis had known contemporary urbanists, they would have transformed their concentration camps into low-income housing’.8 As Ravi Hensman observes in relation to cinematic representations of the Paris suburbs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a perception amongst a number of filmmakers that different spaces ‘shared certain characteristics . . . exemplified by attempts to homogenize spaces through recurring vocabulary, ranging from words evoking restriction (concentrationnaire, donjon, caserne, asile, segregation [sic]) to terms of deprivation (pauvre, déficit, dégradé)’.9 In Nuit et brouillard (1955), Cayrol had already made the analogy between the concentration camp and the town: ‘(a) life-like town with hospital, red-light district, residential area and even – yes – a prison’; ‘The camps stretch out and are full. They are towns of a hundred thousand inhabitants’.10 In his 1967 book on Cayrol, Daniel Oster accurately highlights Cayrol’s attention to the relationship between city life, (in)habitable space and the evisceration of the past.11 Cayrol elaborated on these ideas in essayistic form the next year in his book De l’espace humain (1968). Here he describes how the redesigned cities have become disconnected from human desire, have destroyed the link between present and past, and lack a human dimension, citing as example the depiction of post-war Boulogne in Muriel, the film he made with Alain Resnais in 1963; (‘Our film Muriel was one of the examples of the difficulty of living in a reconstructed city’).12 Cayrol’s vocabulary is that of the city as concentration camp: the new city ‘takes on a monstrous appearance that it did not have before’; the lifts in tower blocks are likened to ‘a bunker with smooth, grey walls’; the inhabitants of ‘these concrete and iron blocks are as if enclosed in this heaviness’; blocks have a ‘small cell-like front door’ leading on to rooms that contain ‘an economical and functional furniture’ and where all that counts is ‘order, cleanliness and things in their right place’. In these places, ‘our life space is no longer regulated by our breath or by our most intimate aspirations. It is subjected in advance to the technical will of the architects and of all those specialists in habitat’. This is a world with no past and

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 127

where ‘camps of all sorts have delivered a fatal blow to the idea of sepulture’. Here, Cayrol writes, ‘everything has its place. Yes, but do every man and woman have their place?’.13 Marie-Laure Basuyaux suggests that the title of Cayrol’s book, De l’espace humain, is a clear reference to the most famous French survivor testimony L’Espèce humaine by Robert Antelme (1947), and that this play on the words ‘espèce/espace’ is then taken up by Perec in his own book Espèces d’espaces (1974).14 Space and the disfigurement of human kind are intertwined in these works and draw together a camp logic and metropolitan everyday life. The following year (1975), Perec published W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the only one of his texts that is specifically concerned with the camps. However, in Espèces d’espaces, Perec is already exploring the connections between horror and the everyday, especially in relation to the question of habitable or (in)human spaces. In a section on ‘the uninhabitable’ (‘l’inhabitable’) he extends the notion of ‘the concentrationary’ to a long list of features that, in Sheringham’s words, ‘disfigure and dehumanize space, ecologically, politically, and socially: barbed wire, polluted seas, soulless tower blocks, shanty towns, grey anonymous spaces, cosy private gardens’.15 Perec’s ideas on space expressed in this book show that, beyond the rational, classifying and categorizing system of space imposed on us from outside, multiple different inner spaces (at an ‘infra’ level, beneath the visible) co-exist. There is, indeed, no general logic separating one space from another except (as Lefebvre had warned) that of the logic of rational, functionalist thought and capitalist design. The task of writing is, then, to disrupt this logic and defamiliarize space: Continue until the place becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for a very brief moment, of being in a foreign town, or, better still, until you don’t understand what is happening or what is not happening, so that the whole place becomes strange, and that you no longer even know that this is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements . . .16 To open up the everyday to the variety of spaces that inhabit it but are invisible to the naked eye (whose vision is restricted to ‘objective’ circumscribed space) is to reveal the proximity and co-presence of spaces that habitual perception tells us inhabit different worlds. In the same section on ‘l’inhabitable’, Perec cites David Rousset’s description of a request made by the SS in 1943 for a green space to border the gas chambers. This request, of course, only seems strange (even incomprehensible) according to our compartmentalized ideas of horror and the everyday. But, in Rousset’s terms taken up by Perec as he unpacks the everyday, these spaces are entirely compatible.17 What makes the connection between Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine, Cayrol’s De l’espace humain and Perec’s Espèces d’espaces even more relevant, beyond the play on words linking space to humankind, is the formal means by which they propose to read the everyday and the visible. As I suggested in the introduction, Cayrol’s oblique style, which addresses the concentrationary only indirectly and allusively through the imprint that it has left on everyday life, is a central aspect of Perec’s own work.

128 | max silverman

The fact that, apart from W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Perec does not refer directly to the camps in his other works and yet, indirectly or obliquely, as Jean-Pierre Salgas observes, talks about nothing else,18 is indicative of Perec’s affinity with Cayrol. However, both Perec and Cayrol are profoundly influenced by the way of reading ‘clandestinely’ (that is, seeing horror as an oblique presence in the everyday) that is one of Antelme’s major strategies for survival in the camps: Through the half-opening (we) peered out at the countryside: land, fields with little men, stooped over, in the middle of them. Space was striving for innocence; so were the children in the village streets, a little lamp above the table inside a house, the face of a gatekeeper at a crossing, the facades of the houses, that peaceful intimacy that you’d find coming from Germany; and the SS strolling along a road, he was striving for innocence too. But an invisible cosmetic covered everything, and the clue to it, the perfect understanding of it belonged to us alone.19 The ‘innocence’ of the scene described by Antelme, which only the victims could detect as a sham (‘an invisible cosmetic’ ‘un macquillage invisible’), is the same false innocence that Cayrol describes at the opening of Nuit et brouillard (‘even a peaceful countryside . . . can lead quite simply to a concentration camp’).20 For both, the ‘key’ to seeing horror in the everyday lies in reading the present as a sign of something else; ‘It’s a secret universe we’re in, clandestine, subversive’ Antelme says elsewhere in L’Espèce humaine, just as Cayrol suggests, in Lazare parmi nous, that a concentrationary reality has ‘grown up clandestinely’ in the post-war world and therefore requires a symptomatic reading to make it visible.21 The same ‘clandestine’ approach to the normalized everyday underpins Cayrol’s subsequent reading of the transformed, post-war city in concentrationary terms in De l’espace humain and profoundly influences Perec’s writing (as the quote from Espèces d’espaces used as preface to this chapter clearly demonstrates). The common feature here – which becomes a common feature of the cultural and sociological critique of everyday life in the 1960s in general – is the idea of new city space (the metropolitan habitable space) as haunted by a concentrationary reality. The challenge to the rationalized, objectified and commodified modern world and the search for freedom that characterized the counter-cultural movements of the times were therefore, in part, a response to the idea of modern life and consumer culture as a new ‘concentrationnat’ (Godard’s Alphaville (1965) is a classic example of this vision). This depiction of everyday life in the post-war city as a new ‘concentrationnat’ will guide the following discussion of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.

Jeanne Dielman and Concentrationary Cinema In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman’s first major film that brought her to the attention of the film world at the age of twenty-six, famously ‘nothing happens’.22 The film deals

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 129

with three days in the life of Jeanne (played by the French actress Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her daily routine in her flat in Brussels. She lives with her son Sylvain, occasionally looks after the baby of a neighbour, corresponds with her sister Fernande in Canada, checks her mail and does her shopping, cooking and cleaning – and also takes in a different male client each day for paid sex to supplement her income. On the third day, she kills her client after having had an orgasm during sex with him. Her daily activities are often filmed in real time and, hence, are as close to ‘real’, everyday life as film can get. Yet, within the ‘nothing’ that happens in Jeanne’s humdrum existence, a complex, multilayered reality is exposed. I will argue that Jeanne Dielman is not only a remarkable portrait of the sort of ‘concentrationary everyday reality’ described by Jean Cayrol in Lazare parmi nous and critiqued by French cultural theorists and practitioners in the post-war period, but is also a good example of Cayrol’s ideas on concentrationary art. On one level, Jeanne’s routinized everyday life in Brussels is revealed as the setting for an inhuman existence. Yet, by making the everyday speak in complex ways, Akerman offers us not only a reading of the overlaps between post-war city space (especially domestic space) and the camp but also the possibility of a rehumanization of that space in terms of memory, desire and the affective life. Lefebvre insisted on the ambiguities of everyday life, in which human freedom and desire are the ever-present, though repressed, double to modern forms of alienation and mystification. In Cayrol’s concentrationary art, making the everyday speak in ambiguous ways must also reveal a new human, split between disfigurement and the potential for human freedom. I will argue that it is especially in terms of this ambiguous sense of disfigurement and liberation of the human that we can call Jeanne Dielman a work of concentrationary cinema.

The Familiar and the Extreme On one level, the depiction of everyday life in Jeanne Dielman as an oppressive and inhuman regime of pain is very clear. Bound to the strict and monotonous routine of domestic order, Jeanne appears like an automaton, alienated from herself, devoid of affect and reduced to sub-human status. She is objectified in a world of objects, lacking in spontaneity, acting out her prescribed and repeated duties in purely mechanical fashion, her body subjected to the oppressive discipline of a commodified existence. One way in which this is shown is through the circulation of elements that connects internal and external space according to the law of the market. For example, Jeanne’s bedroom is a place of commerce through Jeanne’s prostitution, the proceeds from which are placed in the soup tureen on the dining-room table, which are then used to buy the food products in the shops in town that are brought back to the apartment and consumed by Jeanne and her son Sylvain (see Figure 3.1). A circuit of exchange thus connects different objects and spaces according to buying and selling, that is, according to the strict logic of commodity capitalism. In this sense, Jeanne is trapped in an alienating system that operates through her (especially through her body) and makes her into a cipher, a cog in the wheel of consumption (consuming her in the

130 | max silverman

Figure 3.1. ‘The soup tureen’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

process). The internal domestic space is shown to be regulated by the external networks of consumption that discipline Jeanne’s body and deny it the spontaneity that is, according to Hannah Arendt, one of the prerequisites of being human.23 However, it is not only the system of commerce that regulates associations across spaces and draws the elsewhere into the here and now. The constant blue flashing light from outside reflecting in the glass doors of the sideboard in the dining-room, the continual noises off whose source is indeterminate, the radio that plays the Für Elise and an old French song, and so on, all disturb the discrete space of Jeanne’s flat in indeterminate ways.24 The blue flashing light (reminiscent of a surveillance light on a watch-tower or the light of a film projector?) not only confuses the outside and the inside of the flat but also lends a flickering reality to the fixed camera shot within which it is held, and undermines Jeanne’s obsession with turning lights off and on by showing what is outside her control. Akerman’s technique of non-alignment between the image that we see and the figure of Jeanne herself (as the camera often remains focused on the scene when Jeanne has moved out of the frame) or between image and voice (as, for example, the neighbour at the threshold of the front door whom we never see but whose voice – Akerman’s own – we hear) further destabilizes the unified nature of what is in the frame and creates a tension between the visible and the invisible, here and elsewhere. These are not binary opposites but part of the same continuum. The image in Jeanne Dielman cannot contain the full meaning as it is always contaminated by what is off-screen (hors champ); or, rather, that in order to ‘read’ the image we must treat it like a Benjaminian constellation so that the surface elements are shown to be connected with others in space and time.

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 131

This overlaying of different spaces and times is an inherently ambiguous process. The presence of the blue flashing light from outside, for example, which invades domestic space, is (possibly) a sinister intrusion into the banality of Jeanne’s apartment. It creates a sense of the fearful unknown, a ghostly presence shadowing the visible objects that make up Jeanne’s domestic space. Yet, equally, it is (possibly) the sign of a complex affective life within the constraints of bourgeois, humdrum normality. It suggests that the interior domestic space (and Jeanne’s body within it) is not only regulated by the dehumanizing mechanics of commodity capitalism but is the site for the struggle of competing and conflicting discursive practices. The sequence that follows dinner on the first evening is particularly interesting in this regard. Jeanne reads out a letter from her sister, Fernande, in Canada, which is followed by Sylvain’s recital of Baudelaire’s poem ‘L’Ennemi’ from Les Fleurs du mal. In both cases, voices from outside penetrate the enclosed space of the dining-room to establish associations across space and time. Fernande’s letter connects Canada and Belgium and introduces distant geographical and family details (snow, the exceptional height of Fernande’s daughter Jane, and so on) into the oppressive space of the room. More importantly, the past invades the present and death invades life when Fernande mentions that Jeanne’s husband George has been dead for six years and that she often cries over her sister’s situation. The Baudelaire poem acts in a similar way to penetrate the humdrum and prosaic space of the dining room. Just as, in the poem itself, the unnamed ‘enemy’ of the poet’s youth returns to haunt him in the autumn of his years, threatening to overwhelm all attempts to tame it by means of the civilizing domestic tools of ‘the spade and the rake’ (‘la pelle et les rateaux’), so we can read Jeanne’s routine existence in her apartment as a thin veneer of order masking the presence of an ‘enemy’ within (or the disruptive power of poetry itself ) which threatens to overwhelm her. But being overwhelmed can be both a descent into an abyss (trauma) or the path towards excessive and uncontrolled emotion (desire), the Baudelairean paradox of terror and beauty, both a negative and a positive sublime. What makes this sequence even more powerful as a disturbance of ‘normality’ is the way in which the readings of the sister’s letter and the Baudelaire poem are staged and performed. As recitals of texts written by someone else, Jeanne and Sylvain become the mouthpieces (or conduits) for another voice from elsewhere. Reading out her sister’s letter, Jeanne is split between two voices, her own and that of her sister, just as in Akerman’s next film, News from Home (1976), in which Akerman in New York reads out letters from her mother in Belgium, a composite voice emerges between mother and daughter, self and other. Cayrol’s description of the Lazarean figure who is split between two worlds is here acted out in the form of ventriloquism as one voice is spoken through another. Ventriloquism defamiliarizes the space of the dining room and makes it strange as Jeanne occupies an impossible double subject position between her and her sister (overlaying the already-split selves of Jeanne and Fernande as they display the Lazarean quality of being both present in their domestic space

132 | max silverman

yet ‘elsewhere’ at the same time).25 Ventriloquism acts as a sort of embodied form of intertextuality, a performance of a doubled voice and a split subject. The performance is even more complex in the reading of ‘L’Ennemi’. The poem is recited by Sylvain, as he is learning it by rote as part of his school homework. His monotonous delivery and affect-less repetition of the words are those of the zombie or automaton. However, the scene is simultaneously composed of a bewildering plurality of voices and subject positions. While Sylvain is reciting the poem, Jeanne is acting as his prompt and can be seen silently mouthing the words as Sylvain tries to remember them. The camera is situated behind Sylvain, so we only see his back, not his face (and therefore not his mouth). Jeanne, however, is in profile and can be seen looking between the poetry book and Sylvain (see Figure 3.2). In other words, Jeanne is silently mouthing Baudelaire’s words being articulated by Sylvain whose voice we can hear but whose mouth we cannot see moving. Furthermore (as we learn shortly), Sylvain is not using his normal accent but has adopted a more Flemish accent (especially rolling his ‘r’) so that he will not be mocked by his friends at his Flemish-speaking school. So whose voice is this and whose story is being told? This performance of three-way ventriloquism (or puppetry?) has the effect of disturbing any individualized subject position and, hence, evacuating psychological character, as the speech visibly does not belong to any autonomous self. The condensation of different voices also collapses different spaces by converting distance into simultaneity. Ventriloquism operates as a sort of Brechtian device, allowing the

Figure 3.2. ‘Reciting Baudelaire’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 133

words to float free of their speaker and immediate context and act as a disembodied and polyphonic chorus on human affairs. Similarly, the other long monologues in the film – Sylvain’s Oedipal account of learning about sex as a young boy, Jeanne’s story of how she met her husband after the war, and the neighbour’s description of the problem of deciding what to cook for dinner – are all performed in such a way (through the defamiliarizing technique of an affectless recital) as to release them from their spatial and temporal moorings and their containment within a psychological reading of character to occupy another realm between the present and an indeterminate time, between here and elsewhere, and between embodied speech and a more universal discourse. What is actually being acted out in front of us is the transformation of humdrum and normalized domestic space into a theatre for the staging of a concentrationary reality. One of Akerman’s major achievements in the film is to find a way of filming the uncanny, so that the everyday slides between the oppressive banality of the familiar (the reduction of the world to the commodity) and the liberating or frightening world of the strange.26 A similar process occurs with Akerman’s filming of Jeanne’s body and movements. On one level, as we have noted, Jeanne’s body is subjected to the discipline imposed by commodity capitalism and the linear clock time of rationalized modernity. However, the real time filming of many of Jeanne’s banal activities – doing the washing up, flouring the veal, making the coffee, cleaning the bath, and so on – establishes a rhythm, movement and temporality that refuse the straitjacket of that discipline (see Figure 3.3). A very different regime (or non-regime) of the body is established that not only draws attention to its materiality, fluidity and movement but also to an un-

Figure 3.3. ‘In the kitchen’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

134 | max silverman

definable affectivity, in stark contrast to the inhuman and unemotional mask of the automaton within which it is housed. When sex as commerce mutates into sex as orgasm with the third client, the tension between different regimes of the body is clearly visible: they cannot be kept apart, just as commercial exchange is subject throughout to the interruptions of personal, affective and non-functional transactions. Akerman’s filming captures perfectly the uncanny doubling process that shows, or dramatizes, the disfigured human and the poetry of human presence at one and the same time.

Concentrationary Objects and Concentrationary Memory It is, perhaps, through Akerman’s treatment of objects that one can see the ambivalent co-presence of different regimes of sense most clearly. Objects are, at once, locked into a functional system of exchange and consumption, sites of other cultural and historical significance and, like Jeanne’s body, strangely free-floating, removed from any discursive strategy and institutionalized function, and powerfully present in their very materiality. Objects are over-determined sites in which the struggle between human imprisonment and freedom is enacted. As we have mentioned above, the soup tureen on the dining-room table is part of a circuit of exchange that regulates its function. Its value is in terms of its use within a gendered system of commerce. The kitchen implements are also locked in to the same economy of ‘things’ and constitute the technical apparatus for the ordered and mechanical functioning of the system. Jeanne herself is objectified in this world of things. Her body is the site of economic activity, not only in terms of her ‘work’ as a sex worker but also in terms of her repetitive ‘work’ on the assembly line of consumer society – shopping, cooking, cleaning, caring for her son, and so on. Yet, as Laura Marks observes, ‘(e)ven commodities, though they are subject to the deracinating flow of the transnational economy and the censoring process of official history, retain the power to tell the stories of where they have been’.27 Akerman employs a number of filmic devices that undermine the simple use-value of objects, long before this system breaks down anyway from the end of day two when she over-boils the potatoes and leaves one of her buttons undone. For example, the objects in the glass-doored cabinet in the dining-room – a large plate, a large china dog, some dolls – seem to be for ornamental, and possibly sentimental, value rather than use value and, as such, are ‘use-less’ as they are not part of the economy of objects. Though mundane in themselves, they are arranged in the cabinet in such an apparently indiscriminate way that they resemble some surrealist-inspired collection that defies the logic of the marketplace but, having lost their functionality, might be more at home in a flea market, the place for an odd assortment of different objects (and so prized by the surrealists) whose market value is outweighed by sentimental or affective value, and value in terms of memory and history. The settee in the dining-room doubles as Sylvain’s bed just as Jeanne’s bedroom doubles as a ‘work-place’ (the space for the buying and selling of sex) and, eventually, a place for death, thus confusing the discrete use-value of different spaces. This con-

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 135

densation of different spaces and confusion of the function of objects is particularly complex in the murder scene. Jeanne places the package from her sister containing a new night-dress under her bed to receive the client whom she will kill after sexual intercourse, and the scissors that she brings into the bedroom to perform the mundane act of cutting the string of the package will eventually be the murder weapon. Sleep, sex and death are overlaid, a domestic implement becomes a death weapon, the two sisters are brought together through the exchange of the gift, and their different geographical locations (Belgium and Canada) are connected. The bedroom (including the objects in it) is therefore transformed from a mundane domestic space into an overdetermined site for a plurality of meanings, rationalized space fragments into a hybrid composition, and the normal and the extreme are shown to be not opposites but on the same continuum. Furthermore, Akerman’s technique of ‘hyper-realism’ – the long-held shots in real time on everyday objects, the ‘excess of information’ that ‘blocks referentiality’28 – defamiliarize objects and transform them into proxies for other meanings and feelings repressed within the controlled economy of use-value. They become the substitutes for, and carriers of, diverse meanings and affects from elsewhere whose traces can be made visible if only we knew how to read the signs (‘but you must know how to recognize it’, as Cayrol says in relation to scratch marks on the ceilings of the gas chambers in Nuit et brouillard ).29 In Lazare parmi nous, Cayrol reworks the Proustian re-enchantment of objects through a concentrationary lens: they are the vectors of memory, desire, fear and trauma when human relations have been degraded. They carry the affective weight that has been eviscerated from the uni-dimensional surface of everyday life. Later, in De l’espace humain, Cayrol applies this vision of objects as a site of memory in the face of the impoverishment of an inner life brought about by the rationalized spaces of the post-war city. This is a fitting way to describe how Jeanne has been stripped of her humanity in the post-war world of patriarchal commodity capitalism yet still pursues a complex affective life – especially related to traces of the past – indirectly through her fetishistic relationship with material objects. The intense filmic focus on Jeanne’s relationship with objects – which speaks in the place of the break-down in human communication – thus echoes Cayrol’s concentrationary understanding of objects (which, subsequently, had such a profound influence on the descriptions of the new novelists, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet). As Basuyuax observes: Cayrol chooses to give to very everyday objects (knives, glasses, apples) an extreme density of presence and one can consider this close and somewhat paradoxical association between the everyday and the intense as a veritable Cayrolian manifesto statement on description.30 For Cayrol, it is precisely the ‘density’ of objects that interrupts the bland, rationalized and objectified surface of post-war domestic space in the city and gives us back a capacity for memory that has been eviscerated by the tyranny of the visible:

136 | max silverman

‘Memories need to be facilitated in order to exist and how can one remember in these apartments where everything is visible from the first moment?’31 If everyday objects are, then, de-objectified, detached from their normative setting and transformed into vehicles for the transmission of unexpressed desires and fears, an unspoken affectivity and an invisible past, what ‘intense’ past is it that returns in this way? In her excellent book on Chantal Akerman, Marion Schmid relates Jeanne’s past indirectly to the Holocaust: The brief biography Jeanne sketches out for her son on the evening of day one seems to point to a trauma at a young age: at the liberation of Belgium in 1944, Jeanne is an orphan. The cause of her parents’ death is not given. In interviews, Akerman has frequently stated that Jeanne Dielman pays homage to her mother to whom she wanted to give recognition. The film makes no explicit allusion to the camps, yet, eleven years later, in Golden Eighties, Akerman casts the same Delphine Seyrig as a Holocaust survivor liberated by an American GI and unhappily married to a businessman. Her name is Jeanne. The autotextual and autobiographical echoes lift the film out of its immediate space-time and endow it with a history which is obfuscated, but nonetheless alluded to from the beginning through the alarming sound of gas which accompanies the opening credits. The anxiety that needs to be contained in a tight ritualistic practice, the repressed that Jeanne Dielman so emphatically addresses in its formal politics, as in many of Akerman’s later films, then, seems to be implicitly linked to the tragedy of Jewish extermination.32 Schmid’s analysis is entirely convincing and her references to Akerman’s other films and statements reinforce her argument. However, my view of Akerman as a concentrationary artist allows for a slightly different interpretation of her treatment of everyday objects, especially in terms of what we might call her cinematic grammar of the everyday through which she makes horror, disappearance and loss a haunting presence. This grammar (for example, the blue flashing light) allows us to sense these as a contamination of the everyday and the banal, as Cayrol puts it. The de-objectification and anthropomorphizing of objects transform them into the sites of an ethical position that has been degraded in modern consumer capitalism’s objectification of the world. They are the spaces for the allusive or suggested enactment of memory and mourning – but not necessarily in relation to one specific event in the past as they remain unnamed. I would suggest that to reduce Akerman’s cinematic practice to the evocation of the Holocaust fails to capture its more general portrait of the strangeness of the post-war world and the split persona typified by Cayrol’s modern Lazarus (that is, the phenomenology of a new condition). Joshua Hirsch’s comment on Akerman (and other filmmakers) is interesting in this regard, especially the connection he makes between the ‘cinéma vérité’ of Jean Rouch and Akerman’s filmic practice:

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 137

The figures of Marceline, Sol and Anni [in Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été ] are what Jean Cayrol called ‘Lazareans’. For Cayrol – poet, novelist, concentration camp survivor, and author of the commentary in Night and Fog – Lazareans were those who, after Lazarus, had figuratively returned from death to wander, remember, and monologue in seemingly endless and alienated circles. Other film characters with Lazarean qualities are Herman Broder in Enemies, A Love Story (1989), adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, the family portrayed in Brussels-Transit (Belgium, 1980), and, perhaps after a fashion, many of Chantal Akerman’s protagonists.33 Schmid is right to refer to the casting of Delphine Seyrig in Akerman’s later film Golden Eighties in terms of an invasion of a traumatic past into the present. However, if we pursue the concentrationary rather than Holocaust aspect of Akerman’s work, we might, instead, compare Akerman’s use of Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman with Alain Resnais’s casting of her as Hélène in Muriel, for which Cayrol wrote the screenplay, as the Lazarean parallels are striking. Both Hélène and Jeanne live an apparently ‘respectable’ bourgeois life – in Boulogne and Brussels respectively – but both are alienated beings whose lives are contaminated by ‘ghosts’ from the past. The objects in Hélène’s flat are proxies for unresolved traumas, related not to one catastrophic event but at least two (particularly the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence), and possibly more. Her anxiety fixes on and is displaced across different objects and activities (the jumbled assortment of furniture in her flat, her car keys, smoking, gambling and so on) in a fashion similar to the human drama acted out by Jeanne through her relation with things. As in Nuit et brouillard, Resnais and Cayrol’s technique of evoking horror through the banal is both of one event and many events, one time and many times, so that memory floats between the singular and the plural in uncanny fashion and disrupts any attempt to fix it in one place and time.34 The cinematic language of these films, which allows one story to be read allegorically through another (as for example in Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour) encourages us to view the everyday palimpsestically – that is, through a prism in which different stories are overlaid.35 The reduction of the traumatic charge in these films to one event (the Holocaust) denies a more complex, palimpsestic reading of the everyday. This is not to imply that Akerman’s films are not about the Holocaust. Quite the opposite; they can clearly be seen as personal meditations in which the pain of the Holocaust is palpable – transmitted especially through Akerman’s relationship with her mother in an intergenerational memory process that Marianne Hirsch has termed post-memory.36 But they relate, I believe, to the Holocaust and beyond. Akerman’s Benjaminian practice means that the historical charge in the present is not reducible to a linear connection between event and its after-effect but rather as a constellation of different moments in the same place and time, as I argue above in relation to the

138 | max silverman

bedroom murder scene. We lose the paradoxical nature of Akerman’s practice if we reduce the source of horror to one event. Concentrationary, or Lazarean, memory might be a more appropriate term to characterize this floating practice than Holocaust memory.37 Objects are central to concentrationary memory. In Jeanne Dielman, trauma, pain, loss, vulnerability and death cannot be expressed directly, only obliquely, allusively and ambiguously. Objects are the fetishized substitutes for these raw emotions, the fixed loci of a floating anxiety that haunts interior and exterior spaces in a ghost-like way. It is also through the relationship with objects that we can better understand the connection between the art of ventriloquism and concentrationary art: something is made to speak (a presence is evoked) through something else, on which it has left its imprint.38 Yet there is no single secret that objects can yield, even if we can read them as the triggers for something else. The ‘enemy’ (of Baudelaire’s poem) is never named explicitly; it is evoked as a spectral presence in the everyday. The verbal hints of a backstory in the film (the war, Jeanne as an orphan, her loveless marriage to a man who died six years before, Sylvain’s sexual and social anxieties, and so on) never constitute a completed and coherent narrative. So, if objects seem to gesture allusively to other meaning(s) and are the triggers for the return of a past that has not been processed properly but has left its affective mark on the present, they also exceed all social meaning to appear in their material state. These two challenges to normalized surface reality seem to pull in different directions, the first towards socio-cultural/historical/psychic meanings that are masked in everyday life (the everyday as a coded language to be interpreted), the second away from any cultural significance at all to highlight what defies any classifying system, the ‘thingness’ of the thing and the very materiality of existence (the ‘residual’ or ‘indeterminate’ aspect of the everyday, in the terms proposed by Lefebvre and Blanchot respectively). One of the major achievements of the film is that this tension is never resolved. As we have seen, the tureen on the dining-room table – as a container of cultural meaning – is at the intersection of a network of relations: Jeanne’s sexual commerce as a sex worker, her relationship with her son Sylvain (as she takes money from the tureen to give to him for his daily needs), her shopping transactions, and so on (echoing the ‘commerce’ of the title that regulates Jeanne’s life and living space). However, the ‘hyperrealist’ filming technique and the length of the shots of the tureen (just like the over-detailed descriptions of objects in the novels of Alain RobbeGrillet and other Nouveaux Romanciers that undermine a realist understanding of the world) highlight its pure ontological presence, its ‘en soi’ status, detached and floating free from all the historical, political, economic and cultural traffic that surrounds it. As Margulies observes, ‘Akerman’s resistance to signification emerges in writing that lends rhythm and concreteness to banality’.39 If objects are, as Cayrol suggests, the surrogates for a concentrationary human drama, then the tension between their circulation in socio-cultural space and the realm of the ‘Real’ beyond the symbolic order is a fitting analogy for Jeanne’s own existential situation.

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 139

Finale In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman – despite her relatively unknown status as a film director at the time – has already found a vernacular, a grammar, a language, a style and a form for showing the contradictions of post-war, rationalizing, patriarchal consumer culture. She does this by opening up the everyday to invisible structural processes, highlighting the connections between so-called opposites, and by making the uncanny into a performative act on film. Rationalizing modernity conceives of order and disorder, mind and body, space and time, and so on, in dualistic terms, while commodity capitalism reduces the human to the bare life of the object. The poets and critics of the everyday (influenced by Marx, Freud and the surreal) have shown the way to challenge these compartmentalized structures and forms of objectification by transforming the everyday from a fixed, regimented and inhuman space into a fluid, existential process. Their influences are profoundly at work in Akerman’s film, yet her ‘vernacular’ is also strikingly original. The final seven-minute image of Jeanne seated in the dark in the dining-room, the ghostly blue flashing neon light flickering behind her, her white blouse stained with the blood of the murdered third client, her expression floating in some distracted and indeterminate way, is a profound portrait of the familiar domestic space haunted by sex (the orgasm) and death (the murder), eros and thanatos, and unnamed phantoms from the past. The objects in the glass-doored cabinet behind Jeanne and the soup tureen on the table beside her, which (in Laura Marks’s words again) ‘retain the power to tell the stories of where they have been’, add to the complex overlaying of domestic space here (see Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4. ‘Eros and Thanatos’, from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (Dir. Chantal Akerman, Paradise Films, France/Belgium, 201 mins.). DVD screen capture.

140 | max silverman

Yet, as I have argued, the extreme (the ‘enemy’, the positive and negative sublime) has been present throughout, repressed from the surface of the everyday but, nevertheless, made visible through Akerman’s filmic style. Brittany Stigler captures this ambivalence excellently with regard to the final scene: As Jeanne sits at the dining room table with blood on her shirt, we see for the first time the violence of the everyday externalized. It’s important to note that Jeanne Dielman is not a condemnation of Jeanne or her prostitution but rather a staging of the brutality present in everyday banality. Jeanne Dielman is indeed violent but not because it shows murder or madness. Rather, it is violent because it fills the screen with the coded mundane, forcing the viewer to consider what may go unsaid, hidden in the most organic components of the quotidian routine.40 By the end, the mask has slipped, the ideological objectification of human relations (especially of woman) in modern consumer culture has fissured, and the messy world has come rushing in. Yet it is too simplistic to see this as an unambiguous liberation from the oppressive structures that have alienated Jeanne, or to understand her refusal to ‘ingest’ gendered consumer culture (her nausea), her orgasm and the murder of her client simply as signs of a new euphoric and liberated consciousness. The final image is more ambivalent than this and maintains the tension between order and disorder, oppression and freedom, structure and agency, orgasmic elation and fear, and, especially, horror and the everyday. As Stigler observes, rather than resolve the tension, it stages it. The Cayrolean doubling is maintained throughout by an art that (like the Baudelairean paradox) is a blend of the everyday and the universal human drama of passion and pain. The familiar and the extreme are on the same continuum, if only we knew how to read them as interconnected terms, if only we knew how to sense the invisible in the visible, if only we could hear Lazarus’s footstep, if only we knew how to interrogate everyday space.

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race and violence. His most recent monograph, entitled Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013), considered the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. He has recently published three coedited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of the ‘concentrationary’: Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ (Berghahn, 2011), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

| 141

Notes 1. ‘Le problème n’est pas d’inventer l’espace, encore moins de le ré-inventer . . . mais de l’interroger, ou, plus simplement encore, de le lire; car ce que nous appelons quotidienneté n’est pas évidence, mais opacité: une forme de cécité, une manière d’anesthésie.’ G. Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Galilée, 1974). 2. See especially H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (vol. 1), (New York and London: Verso, 2008). 3. M. Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 134. 4. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 245. 5. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 244. 6. G. Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, Editions Lebovici, 1988. Accessed online at www .1libertaire.free.fr/DebordCommentaires.html on 3 August 2017). As Silke Segler-Messner notes, this also corresponds to the ‘acerbic critique of 1960s society that reduces the arts to the state of consumer goods’ / ‘critique acerbe de la société des années soixante qui réduit les arts à l’état de marchandise consommable’ (‘Pour une esthétique de l’imaginaire dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cayrol’, in P. Kuon (ed.), ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’ Poétiques de Jean Cayrol. Eidôlon, 87. (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009), 106. 7. ‘Debord est un auteur lazaréen.’ J.-L. Déotte, ‘Le Régime nominal de l’art. Jean Cayrol: une esthétique lazaréenne’ in A. Brossat and J.-L. Déotte (eds), L’Époque de la disparition: Politique et esthétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 36. 8. R. Vaneigem, ‘Comments against urbansim’, Internationale Situationniste, No. 6 (August 1961), trans. P. Hammond. Accessed online at www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/comments.html on 3 August 2017. 9. R. Hensman, ‘Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968’, Modern & Contemporary France 21(4) (2013), 435–51, 442. 10. ‘Cité vraisemblable avec hôpital, quartier réservé, quartier résidentiel, et même – oui – une prison’; ‘Les camps s’étendent, sont pleins. Ce sont des villes de cent milles habitants’. J. Cayrol, ‘Nuit et brouillard (commentaire)’ in Nuit et brouillard (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 17–43, 36 and 39 respectively. 11. D. Oster, Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 109–12. 12. ‘Notre film Muriel a été un des exemples de la difficulté de vivre dans une ville reconstruite.’ J. Cayrol, De l’espace humain (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 39. 13. ‘Prend une monstruosité qu’elle n’avait pas’ (De l’espace humain, 13); ‘un blockhaus aux parois lisses et grises’ (15); ‘ces masses de béton et de fer sont comme enclos dans cette pesanteur’ (17); ‘petite porte d’entrée cellulaire’, ‘le mobilier économique, fonctionnel’ (25); ‘l’ordre, la propreté, les choses à leur place’ (33); ‘notre espace vital n’est plus réglé par notre propre respiration, nos propres aspirations intimes. Il est soumis à l’avance aux techniques des architectes et de tous les spécialistes de l’habitat’ (51); ‘les camps de toutes sortes ont porté un coup fatal à cette idée de sépulture’ (138); ‘chaque chose a sa place. Oui mais chaque homme a-t-il sa place?’ (25). 14. M.-L. Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement: les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009), 119. In an article that he wrote on Antelme, Perec recognizes that, for Antelme, there is no separation between the world of the camps and the world outside: ‘But it’s a lie to talk of two worlds; they cannot be separated’ / ‘Mais ces deux mondes sont un mensonge; ils ne se laissent pas séparer.’ (‘Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature’ in D. Dobbels (ed.), Robert Antelme, textes inédits sur L’Espèce humaine: Essais et témoignages (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 173–90, 180 (first appeared in Partisans, 1963)). In the same article, Perec describes Antelme’s text as ‘the most perfect example in contemporary French literature of what literature can be’ / ‘l’exemple le plus parfait, dans la production francaise contemporaine, de ce que peut être la littérature’ (188). 15. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 56. 16. ‘Continuer, jusqu’à ce que le lieu devienne improbable, jusqu’à ressentir, pendant un très bref instant, l’impression d’être dans une ville étrangère, ou, mieux encore, jusqu’à ne plus comprendre ce qui se passe ou ce qui ne se passe pas, que le lieu tout entier devienne étranger, que l’on ne sache même plus que ça s’appelle une ville, une rue, des immeubles, des trottoirs . . .’, Perec, Espèces d’espaces, 73–74.

142 | max silverman

17. Perec, Espèces d’espaces, 121. Charlotte Delbo refers to the same incident in Aucun de nous ne reviendra ((Auschwitz et après 1) (Paris: Minuit, 1970), 146): ‘They want to make a garden at the entrance to the camp’ / ‘Ils veulent faire un jardin à l’entrée du camp’. It is interesting to note that Delbo, whose writings on her experience in Auschwitz are one of the most powerful examples of the uncanny blend of horror and the everyday, was Henri Lefebvre’s assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in the early 1960s. Michael Rothberg observes that ‘(a)lthough Delbo’s association with Lefebvre is often noted, no one has yet attempted to make sense of that connection’ (Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 203). One way of making sense of that connection is in terms of the proximity of theories of the concentrationary and the everyday for a number of cultural theorists and practitioners at this time. 18. J. P. Salgas, ‘Shoah ou la disparition’ in D. Hollier (ed.), De la Littérature française (Paris: Bordas, 1993), 1005–13, 1011. The best-known work on Perec’s oblique style is P. Lejeune, La Mémoire et l’oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe (Paris: POL, 1991). For links between Perec and Cayrol, see B. Magné, ‘Georges Perec oulibiographe’ in P. Kuon (ed), Oulipo – Poétiques (Tubingen: Narr, 1999), 41–62; and Kuon’s own essay ‘La “peste” / le “concentrationnaire”: poétiques de l’oblique (Cayrol, Camus, Rousset, Perec)’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Oulipo – Poétiques, 145–59. For links between Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and Cayrol’s novel Les corps étrangers, see Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 410–11. 19. ‘Par l’entrebâillement, on a regardé la campagne: de la terre, des champs, des petits hommes au milieu, courbés. L’espace voulait être innocent, les enfants aussi dans les rues des villages, une petite lampe au-dessus de la table à l’intérieur d’une maison, la figure d’un garde-barrière, les façades des maisons et cette intimité paisible que l’on surprenait de l’Allemagne et le SS aussi, se promenant sur une route, voulait être innocent. Mais un maquillage invisible était partout, dont nous seuls avions la clef, la parfaite conscience.’ R. Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [1947]), 34 / The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, IL: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1998), 28. 20. ‘Même un paysage tranquille . . . peu[t] conduire tout simplement à un camp de concentration’, J. Cayrol, ‘Nuit et brouillard (commentaire)’, 17. 21. ‘On est en pleine clandestinité’, Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, 53 / The Human Race, 45; Cayrol, Lazare parmi nous, 29. 22. See I. Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996). 23. See H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). 24. Margulies observes that ‘when a song’s lyrics are heard in an Akerman film, it is always a corny love song, or else a classical musical cliché, like the ‘Für Elise’ heard over the radio in Jeanne Dielman’ (Nothing Happens, 211). In the essay ‘Lazarean Literature’, Cayrol makes a similar point about the radio: it is a modern form of drowning out the sound of Lazarus’s footstep and of keeping existential anxiety at bay. This may also be true in Jeanne Dielman for listening to the radio, like other repetitive acts, fills the void. However, it could also be the case that even a musical cliché like the ‘Für Elise’, or the old song on the radio on the second day, which interrupts Jeanne’s train of thought as she is writing her letter to her sister, can break through the aestheticizing effects of repetition and familiarity to open up an affective and anamnestic space. 25. Fernande’s letter suggests, indirectly, that she has not properly integrated into Canadian society as her husband Jack suggests she adopt the customs of the country. 26. For an interesting discussion of the uncanny in Jeanne Dielman, see Margulies, Nothing Happens, 90–92. 27. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 78. 28. Margulies, Nothing Happens, 71. Benoît Peeters points out that it is not only an excess of realist detail that destabilizes referentaility but also its opposite, a lack of detail, as for example the moments that we do not see during Jeanne and Sylvain’s routine evening walk round the block, or the first two

concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

| 143

scenes of prostitution. (B. Peeters, ‘“Jeanne Dielman”: le manque et le supplément’ in Ateliers des Arts, Cahier no. 1 (1982), 79–84). ‘il faut le savoir’. Cayrol, ‘Nuit et brouillard (commentaire)’, 38. ‘Cayrol choisit d’accorder une extrême densité de présence des objets très quotidiens (le couteau, le verre, la pomme) et l’on peut considérer cette association étroite et quelque peu paradoxale entre quotidienneté et intensité comme une véritable proposition du manifeste cayrolien en matière de description.’ Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement, 107–08. ‘Les souvenirs ont besoin d’être facilités pour pouvoir exister et comment se souvenir dans ces appartements où tout est visible dès le premier instant?’, Cayrol, De l’Espace humain, 26. Basuyaux notes the anamnestic significance for Cayrol of objects that have lost their functional value: ‘(P)reserving memory requires the conservation of those “things” which one no longer uses but which still contain the marks of their use or wear from the past’ / ‘(P)réserver la mémoire nécessite de conserver ces “choses” dont on n’a plus l’usage et qui portent en elle la marque d’une usure ou d’une détérioration passée’ (Témoigner clandestinement, 125). M. Schmid, Chantal Akerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 50. J. Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 163, note 2. The ‘cinéma vérité’ of Jean Rouch in the early 1960s, of which his film Chronique d’un été (1961), made with the sociologist Edgar Morin, is a good example, displays the convergence at this time of a new popular ethnography, the sociology of the everyday and the concentrationary (amongst other influences). See my chapter ‘Fearful imagination: Night and Fog and concentrationary memory’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), 199–213. See my Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). M. Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Akerman’s own understanding of the link between imprisonment and the camps via her mother’s experience supports both a concentrationary and Holocaust reading: ‘The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work . . . Sometimes not very frontally. La Captive, it’s the same, Jeanne Dielman, it’s the same. She is also in her own jail, and she needs her jail to survive. That’s why when she got an orgasm, it destroyed her jail and her existence, and so she killed the guy. And the jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.’ (‘Chantal Akerman’ by Sam Adams, A.V. Club Interview. Accessed online at http://www .avclub.com/article/chantal-akerman-37600 on 6 April 2016. Akerman’s choice of Seyrig is, presumably, also influenced by the latter’s role as the nameless woman in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and her subsequent reputation as the muse of indeterminate memory. Seyrig has this ability to capture the uncanny feeling of a bland present haunted by the past, a blend of conscious and unconscious forces and an other-worldly persona, all of which are signs of the Lazarean. In Agnès Varda’s film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), the lurking presences behind the polished surfaces, screens and spectacles of Parisian consumer society are Cléo’s cancer and the unspoken (until the end) Algerian War of Independence. Margulies, Nothing Happens, 158. Brittany Stigler, ‘Tender Potatoes’, The New Inquiry (22 January 2016). Accessed online at http:// thenewinquiry.com/essays/tender-potatoes/ on 4 April 2016.

Bibliography Akerman, C. ‘Chantal Akerman’ by Sam Adams, A.V. Club Interview. Accessed online at www.avclub .com/article/chantal-akerman-37600 on 6 April 2016.

144 | max silverman

Antelme, R. L’Espèce humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [1947]; The Human Race, trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler. Evanston, IL: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1998. Basuyaux, M.-L. Témoigner clandestinement: les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol. Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009. Cayrol, J. ‘Nuit et brouillard (commentaire)’ in Nuit et brouillard. Paris: Fayard, 1997, 17–43. Cayrol, J. De l’espace humain. Paris: Seuil, 1968. Debord, G. Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, 1988. Editions Lebovici, 1988. Accessed online at www.1libertaire.free.fr/DebordCommentaires.html on 3 August 2017. Delbo, C. Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Auschwitz et après 1). Paris: Minuit, 1970. Déotte, J.-L. ‘Le Régime nominal de l’art. Jean Cayrol: une esthétique lazaréenne’ in A. Brossat and J.-L. Déotte (eds), L’Époque de la disparition: Politique et esthétique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000, 13–37. Hensman, R. ‘Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968’. Modern & Contemporary France 21(4) (2013), 435–51. Hirsch, J. Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Hirsch, M. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kuon, P. ‘La “peste” le “concentrationnaire”: poétiques de l’oblique (Cayrol, Camus, Rousset, Perec)’ in P. Kuon (ed.), Oulipo – Poétiques. Tubingen: Narr, 1999, 145–59. Lefebvre, H. Critique of Everyday Life (vol. 1). New York and London: Verso, 2008. Lejeune, P. La Mémoire et l’oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe. Paris: POL, 1991. Magné, B. ‘Georges Perec oulibiographe’ in P. Kuon (ed), Oulipo – Poétiques. Tubingen: Narr, 1999, 41–62. Margulies, I. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Oster, D. Jean Cayrol et son oeuvre. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Peeters, B. ‘“Jeanne Dielman”: le manque et le supplément’ in Ateliers des Arts, Cahier no. 1 (1982), 79–84. Perec, G. Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Galilée, 1974. Perec, G. ‘Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature’ in D. Dobbels (ed.), Robert Antelme, textes inédits sur L’Espèce humaine: Essais et témoignages. Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 173–90. Rothberg M. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Salgas, J.-P. ‘Shoah ou la disparition’ in D. Hollier (ed.), De la Littérature française. Paris: Bordas, 1993, 1005–13. Sheringham, M. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Segler-Messner, S. ‘Pour une esthétique de l’imaginaire dans l’oeuvre de Jean Cayrol’ in P. Kuon (ed.), ‘Les Mots sont aussi des demeures’ Poétiques de Jean Cayrol. Eidôlon, 87. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009, 99–113. Schmid, M. Chantal Akerman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Silverman, M. ‘Fearful imagination: Night and Fog and concentrationary memory’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011, 199–213. Silverman, M. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. Stigler, B. ‘Tender Potatoes’, The New Inquiry (22 January 2016). Accessed online at http://thenewinquiry .com/essays/tender-potatoes/ on 4 April 2016. Vaneigem, R. ‘Comments against urbansim’, Internationale Situationniste, No. 6 (August 1961), trans. P. Hammond). Accessed online at www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/comments.html on 3 August 2017.

CHAPTER 4

Cinematic Work as Concentrationary Art in Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines (1999) Matthew John

What could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanisation of socially necessary but painful performances? —Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man1 In 1969 Jean-Luc Godard (b.1930) opened his documentary film, British Sounds, with a tracking shot of a factory assembly line lasting some ten minutes (9 minutes 32 seconds). This continuous shot epitomizes the critical confrontation with the workplace in the film that follows, as if reminding the viewer through its very monotony that ‘it is useless to expect even a caricature of creativity from the conveyor belt’.2 In 1999, thirty years later, Laurent Cantet opens his film, Ressources humaines (Human Resources) with an equally empathic tracking shot of a desolate factory-scape, viewed this time through a train window. Leaving the striking aesthetic similarities of these two shots aside, it is clear that the strong thematic resonance between the two films speaks more broadly to a common critical concern with work and the workplace. Indeed, a whole host of French filmmakers are once again turning their attention to the urgent question of labour, and an emerging body of scholarly work frames it as the site of an invisible, social violence against the human subject.3 This pre-occupation with work is exemplified by a special edition of the journal Modern and Contemporary France in 2011, entitled ‘Figurations of Work in Post-Fordist France’, which seeks ‘to make sense of the emergence of work as a central theme of both recent cultural representations and political struggles in France’.4 This chapter will contribute to these debates by arguing that Jean Cayrol’s notion of a concentrationary art is a way of making sense of the re-emergence of work and

146 | matthew john

the workplace as critical issues for a politically engaged French cinema. First, I shall extend the significant work already done by Christophe Dejours to link the site of the contemporary workplace with the concentrationary universe by means of a reference to Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil.5 My own reading of the contemporary workplace through the theoretical lens of the concentrationary will place the work of the Situationist thinker, Raoul Vaneigem, and the neo-Marxist critique offered by Herbert Marcuse alongside that of two other significant initiators of the theoretical concept of the concentrationary, Jean Cayrol and David Rousset. In doing so, I shall highlight a consistent logic that enslaves bodies and imprisons minds in the service of technology, reducing a universe of limitless possibility, creativity and life to a series of one-dimensional gestures and performances. I suggest that it is the isolation and immateriality of the concentrationary that is recalled most strongly by a capitalist system moving increasingly from the material to the immaterial, and that these are, in turn, the conditions of a collective indifference towards the suffering of others and the dominance of the systemic over the individual.6 The contemporary period within which I frame this reading is, therefore, very much the period described by Albert Camus in his own consideration of the modern condition as ‘our machine-age’.7 I shall focus on the work of the contemporary French filmmaker, Laurent Cantet, in order to demonstrate the continued significance of Cayrol’s concentrationary aesthetic in receiving and interpreting our current cultural production. The overtly social credentials of Cantet’s filmmaking make him an apt candidate for this task; his examination of racial and social tensions within the education system of the Parisian banlieue, Entre les murs (2008), received particular critical acclaim, winning the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes. Cantet is, however, especially relevant to this discussion because he is one of the filmmakers who has, more recently, turned their lens once again on the question of labour, and sought to trace the changing conditions of both worker and workplace in the present phase of neoliberal capitalism. Following film theorist/historian Martin O’Shaughnessy’s assertion that, ‘when dealing with work related films, it may be more interesting to ask what they do (how they seek to change the way we look upon the world) than what they show’,8 I argue that there is an important distinction between the representation of work and what I will define as the cinematic work of the film text in Ressources humaines, the first of Cantet’s two films focussing on work and the workplace.9 Cantet uses a number of realist devices in the film to work upon its melodramatic façade and expose the systemic violence of the workplace. I use this distinction to produce a reading of the film, not simply as an instance of concentrationary art, but as what Cayrol described as a ‘concentrationary realism’, that is, an aesthetic form in which the latent, structural violence of the concentrationary universe forms the ever-present backdrop to the (melo)-drama of our everyday lives.10 By exposing the deep interdependence of individual, melodramatic tensions and their systemic causes in this way, I suggest that this formal work of the film opens out a space for the kind of impassioned, political response to the suffering

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 147

of others that Judith Butler refers to as the ‘ec-static’.11 This is ultimately a space in which we are able to recognize ourselves as socially constituted beings, actively participating in the systemic violence suffered by others. Finally, whilst certain critical commentaries have sought to interpret the film as a form of ‘new realism’,12 and align it with what O’Shaughnessy has defined as a ‘return to the social’ within contemporary French filmmaking, I use my reading of the film as an instance of ‘concentrationary realism’ to re-evaluate the way in which it is read politically.13 This projects the politics of the film beyond the immediate concerns with the theme of work and the workplace, and links it to the much more pertinent, and indeed persistent, questions about the position of the human in this age of technology foregrounded by the attention to work and work spaces. This approach yields a more flexible, and ultimately more widely applicable, yardstick with which to measure the disparate and ‘ambiguous’ nature of politics in the post-1995 period.14 By returning to the opening tracking shot from British Sounds with which I began this chapter, I can argue that this ‘concentrationary realism’ links Ressources humaines not only to directors such as Godard in the 1960s, but with the French tradition of cinéma-verité more broadly, and its own equally dynamic mix of fiction, documentary and the social. The very fact that socially concerned filmmakers should continue to deconstruct everyday settings such as the workplace should, at the very least, place the concentrationary at the centre of a dialogue between novel forms of violence against the human across different sites of late capitalism and neoliberal modernity.

The Workplace as the Site of the Concentrationary Logic If the workplace is once again the focus of cultural representation, with many French documentary films using it as the locus for a critical interrogation of contemporary French society, it has also been the focus of a theoretical interrogation in scholarly discourse. The writings of the French psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours are fundamental in any attempt to elucidate a link between the logic of the workplace and the concentrationary universe. Dejours interprets the systemic violence and inherently dehumanizing conditions of the workplace by evoking Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. He writes: ‘I ought to add that if the banality of evil is not exceptional, in so much as it could be said to be inherent within the mechanisms of liberalism itself, it is equally implicated in the legacy of totalitarianism up to and including Nazism’.15 Although Dejours offers a distinctive elaboration of the original Arendtian phrase, ‘the banality of evil’, used in the last lines of her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem,16 I would argue that it is this direct reference to the work of a theorist of the concentrationary – Arendt draws on David Rousset in her 1948 essay on concentration camps – that sets his work apart from other significant commentaries of contemporary capitalism, which make sporadic references to the concentration camps, but never explicitly link the two in a coherent thesis.17 Marcuse and Vaneigem, to whom I shall return consistently throughout this chapter, are interesting in this regard as

148 | matthew john

they both link the concentrationary fleetingly with the theme of work, without ever coherently forming a thesis that links the two. For example, Marcuse states in characteristically cryptic terms that, ‘what begins as the horror of the concentration camps turns into the practice of training people for abnormal conditions . . . a subterranean human existence and the daily intake of radioactive nourishment’.18 Vaneigem makes the following observation: Nowadays ambition and the love of a job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the stale fart of ideology makes headway, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung.19 Part of what follows will develop these explicit, yet isolated, references to the camps into a far more coherent link between the concentrationary and the workplace through the differing phases of capitalist modernity. To avoid the trap of conflating the two systems, however, Dejours is careful to qualify this link with a key question, ‘But what then are the differences between totalitarianism and neo-liberalism? Where can we draw a dividing line?’.20 Although it is clearly important not to ignore any such important distinctions between neo-liberal society, viewed here through the specific lens of the workplace, and the concentrationary universe, viewed through the specific historical moment of the concentration camp, I would suggest that this desire to redraw the line between the two in fact represents something of a backward step, especially when the process of blurring that line has been so hard-fought, and remains largely undone. It is clearly the case that an extremely careful negotiation of similarity and difference is required here: these are systems that are, at once, very different yet, undeniably, exhibit a common logic that operates within them, and one that will manifest itself in different ways and across different sites of modernity. It is, therefore, my contention that in order to allow the concentrationary to speak to and inform our interpretation of the different threats posed to the human condition across technological modernity, Dejours’s question must be approached in the opposite terms: that is to say, rather than insisting on the differences between the two systems, of which there are undoubtedly many, it is vital to elucidate instead the unexpected points of commonality within this difference, to define, as it were, the core structures of a concentrationary logic.21 I would argue that this is all the more urgent given the work of thinkers such as Paul Gilroy or Giorgio Agamben who identify the concentration camp as inherent in the very logic of societies of modernity, or, to use Agamben’s term, as the ‘nomus’ of the modern.22 The careful negotiation of continuity within change is undertaken admirably by Vaneigem in his fascinating historical work The Movement of the Free Sprit (1986) in which he attempts to trace the thread of resistance to market capitalism from medieval feudalism through to the present day. My attempt to read the concentrationary

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 149

alongside the contemporary workplace is essentially an affirmation of his paradoxical suggestion that, ‘while constantly changing, man’s exploitation of man has remained essentially the same’.23 As such, the logic of work becomes a thread of continuity in a contemporary phase of the concentrationary. In his own writing on the concentrationary Cayrol highlights this in the following terms: Up until now, the testimonies from the camps that we have known and read have certainly been moving, but they have only shown one facet of the camps, the most spectacular, the most reliable, the most hideous, but this facet was only applicable up until the Liberation; after that, we no longer knew which mask it would put on. Only the books of Antelme or Rousset endure; they sketched out the general physiognomy of German camps, which are already being consigned to concentrationary prehistory.24 According to Cayrol, the German camps are not the horrific end-point, located safely in the past, but merely the beginning of the concentrationary threat that forms part of the very possibility that modernity itself contains. Thus, any meaningful discussion of the concentrationary does not focus on the system or site within which it operates, be it the workplace or the concentration camp, but rather the logic that underpins it. Whilst Dejours’s scholarship has undeniably made an instrumental first step in making the link between the contemporary workplace and the concentrationary more explicit, it is limited to Arendt’s reading of Eichmann and the pervasiveness of a concentrationary logic. Here I am more concerned with the core structures and conditions of this logic, and how they might inform our recognition of novel forms of violence enacted in late capitalism and notably in its current, neoliberal form. The first wave of concentrationary thinkers, those poets, writers, artists and intellectuals, like Cayrol and Rousset, were directly affected by the experience of the concentration camps of Germany and, more importantly, were prompted to process this experience through a type of political analysis rather than as testimony. For Rousset, this analysis takes the form of his work L’Univers concentrationnaire, whereas Cayrol develops his theoretical-aesthetic interrogation of the camps in the two separate essays that together form the work Lazare parmi nous (included in this volume). It is in the second essay, Pour un Romanesque lazaréen, that he most comprehensively outlines the terms of his concentrationary art, an art that serves to resist the continued threat of ‘the old concentrationary monster’.25 It is only in addressing these original voices from the camps, who not only witnessed the concentrationary universe in all its terror, but produced representations that analysed it as a system, and most importantly as an index of actual conditions permeating society outside of barbed wire perimeters, that we can begin to benefit from the concentrationary in our attempts to consider the position of the human at our present historical juncture. The first way in which this logic can be traced across its various sites is through the very question of labour itself and its specific work of dehumanization. Rousset,

150 | matthew john

for example, describes the dehumanized detainee and the worker under capitalism as almost indistinguishable. He identifies ‘an entire race of men naked, inwardly naked, stripped of all culture, all tradition, armed with spades and picks, mattocks and sledge hammers, chained to rusty ore cars, grubbers of salt, sweepers of snow, mixers of cement’.26 As Vaneigem’s use of the term above suggests, there is of course a very familiar association between work and the concentration camp, which can be reduced to an infamous slogan: Arbeit Macht Frei and the broader policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, or extermination by work, which encompasses it. The conception of labour within the space of the camp (or using camp labour in surrounding factories) exists as a pre-capitalist kind of slave labour, which, as Antelme highlights, conceals, however weakly, its underlying project of dehumanization and inevitable destruction; ‘The factory’s organisation, the coordination of the work masks the real work being done here. It is being done on us, and it’s the work of making us die’.27 Although the specific terms are clearly very different, capitalist society equally functions to limit the conditions of possibility for its workers. As Marxist art historian T.J. Clark observes in his article in 2012, ‘For a Left with No Future’: ‘individuality is held together by a fiction of full existence to come’.28 Marcuse similarly notes that the dehumanizing conditions of a technological society cause a ‘flattening out of the contrast (or the conflict) of the given and the possible’.29 In other words, the society of democracy, freedom and infinite possibility in which we live has become ‘one-dimensional’, or one precisely without possibility.30 Marcuse highlights, in particular, the false, and dangerous, promise of capitalist society that enslaves in the name of freedom and at the mercy of the market. He writes: The enchained possibilities of advanced industrial societies are: development of the productive forces on an enlarged scale, extension of the conquest of nature, growing satisfaction of needs for a growing number of people, creation of new needs and faculties. But these possibilities are gradually being realised through means and institutions which cancel their liberating potential, and this process affects not only the means but also the ends. The instruments of productivity and progress, organized into a totalitarian system determine not only the actual but also the possible utilisations.31 This inherent absence of possibility in late capitalism is also emphasized by Vaneigem. He identifies it as a soporific state of survival that acts as a foil to any positive affirmation of human creativity, pleasure, or simply life. Instead of the multidimensional possibilities of life, ‘(s)urvival is life reduced to bare essentials, to life’s abstract form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure men’s participation in production and consumption’.32 In contrast to the slave labour imposed on the prisoners in the concentration camp, the dehumanizing work of labour within the capitalist system is inseparable from its emergence in an exchange, or commodity form. The process of separating

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 151

specific, distinguishable labour in its concrete form into something that is common to all commodities marks a kind of dehumanization at the heart of capitalist relations of production: labour, and the human activity that produces it, becomes a commodity itself within the logic of the market. Such is the acceptance of labour in its abstract form within our current capitalist relations of production that the Marxist sociologist, John Holloway, bases part of his understanding of the revolutionary project precisely around the need to resurrect and reanimate a, now-absent, tension between labour in its abstract and concrete forms: We create the society that holds us entrapped. In capitalism, we do so because the way in which our activities are bound together, through exchange, imposes certain ways of behaving upon us that neither we nor anyone else controls. The way in which our activities are bound together gives an illusion of freedom, but in fact our activities weave a web that is controlled by nobody, ruled by the necessity to produce things as efficiently as possible, in the socially necessary labour time. That is what Marx refers to when he speaks of abstract labour . . . At times, it seems that there is nothing more in life than the abstract labour of capitalism, but we know that it is not so, and all that we have discussed in relation to the cracks tells us that it is not so. Marx insists on the two-fold nature of labour, not just on abstract labour.33 As such, it is important to return to Marx’s initial identification of labour in its general, abstract form within the emerging capitalist system. He identifies a process through which, along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.34 In conjunction with the more apparent physical violence that the camp inflicted upon the bodies of its detainees through forced labour, it is equally important to acknowledge the presence of a far less visible, but no less destructive, psychological violence. In his articulation of the latent violence of the concentrationary, Cayrol identifies ‘a mental epidemic that rapidly takes hold in us’ in the form of the slow, psychological destruction of the human mind.35 Likewise, Rousset insists upon ‘the imperious necessity to struggle against the slow dissolution of ideas’.36 This gradual disintegration of the human capacity for thought provides a much more appropriate measure of how a latent, and inherently insidious, concentrationary logic might operate within the current phase of neoliberal capitalism in particular, as we move increasingly away from the physical labour of its industrial phase towards the immaterial, ‘cognitive’ model identified by the French socialist, economist and philosopher, Yann Moulier Boutang.37

152 | matthew john

Indeed, as we shift from the material to the immaterial, it is imperative to understand the intimate interdependence of latent and spectacular violence if we are to understand how the violence of the concentrationary logic might inform our reading of the contemporary workplace. As Butler suggests in her own analysis of the powers of contemporary violence, it is ultimately ‘a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanisation that is already at work in the culture’, or, as I am arguing, the culture of work itself.38 This exchange between the latent and the spectacular, the visible and the invisible, will form part of my subsequent reading of the concentrationary logic in the film Ressources humaines, where the systemic violence of the workplace is the catalyst for a series of individual outbursts that are more overtly antagonistic and spectacular in nature. Holloway provides a compelling argument for the abstraction of human thought that lies at the very heart of the contemporary society of production, and the damaging psychological restrictions imposed by the contemporary workplace in particular: Labour imprisons our bodies in an obvious way: it shuts them up in factories or offices or schools for a large part of our waking life, or binds them to computers or mobile phones. But, in a less obvious way, the abstraction involved in capitalist labour also creates an equally profound prison, a prison that encloses our minds – the way we think, the concepts we use. There is a tearing-apart at the core of our existence, the separation of ourselves from the determination of what we do, and this tearing-apart affects every aspect of our lives.39 Marcuse also extends his idea of ‘one-dimensionality’ to one-dimensional thought, and consequently posits the idea of critical, or dialectical thought, as a possible point of resistance to this psychological violence against the human. He suggests that: Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions.40 The final point that resonates strongly between these Situationist and neo-Marxist critiques and the initial theoretical analyses of the camps produced by Cayrol and Rousset is the implication of technology in this abstraction of human activity and thought. Cayrol’s theorization of the concentrationary is marked by its implicit criticism of the technological nature of the threat against the human. According to Cayrol, the concentrationary universe, both within the camp and beyond its barbedwire perimeter, is characterized by a disinterested and spiritless investment in a world of disembodied objects and empty reflections that he describes as a ‘parasitic love’.41 It is a contract with the world that describes a movement away from an investment in the real, towards an increasing investment in the realm of the virtual or the imaginary.

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 153

What is particularly interesting about this section of Cayrol’s essay is that it allows the reader to extend these reflections beyond the play of affects within the more specific context of the camp itself, or indeed the specific context of the individual returning from it, to locate it in the very heart of contemporary society and, in particular, the isolation and indifference characteristic of an increasingly immaterial world. Cayrol reminds his reader that: (P)arasitic love is not just the product of concentration camps, but an effect of this godless universe where the ersatz becomes mixed up with the purest inventions of our hearts and spirituality. This indifferent world in which we live only exists in its own reflection, its echo, its image.42 Like Cayrol, Marcuse is equally persuasive about the role of technology in this process of abstraction that characterizes the world of consumption in which we live: Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. In this universe, technology also provides the great rationalization of the un-freedom of man and demonstrates the ‘technical’ impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one’s own life. For this un-freedom appears neither irrational nor as political, but rather as submission to the technical apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of labour. Technological rationality thus protects rather than cancels the legitimacy of a domination, and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a rationally totalitarian society.43

Ressources humaines as Concentrationary Cinema For Cayrol, the violence of a technological society does not operate exclusively at the level of the individual, and the ‘un-freedom of man’ identified here by Marcuse, but rather extends to a dominance of the individual over the collective and a condition of indifference towards the suffering of others.44 He suggests that this is characterized by ‘a lassitude of epic proportions – newspaper articles remind us of this daily. We kill out of lassitude. We let others starve to death out of lassitude’.45 Although he always remains mindful of our ever-increasing investment in a world of images and objects, his consideration of technology is also marked by an important note of ambivalence that seems equally to emphasize, if implicitly, its revolutionary potential. His thesis of concentrationary art, therefore, seeks to rescue technology from its potential to sustain the damaging isolation of an immaterial existence. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by his support for the cinematic medium itself. There is no explicit mention by Cayrol of the cinema in those pages where he first outlines his thesis on concentrationary art. His career, however, is characterized by a

154 | matthew john

pronounced shift from its origins in literature to an intense involvement in cinematic production. This is consolidated by the theoretical volume on the cinema, Le Droit de regard, which Cayrol wrote in collaboration with Claude Durand.46 This volume can, therefore, be read as a supplement to the ideas on concentrationary art that Cayrol outlined in Lazare parmi nous. My analysis of Cantet’s Ressources humaines as a form of ‘concentrationary cinema’ will follow Cayrol’s own trajectory in applying his earlier ideas on concentrationary literature to the cinema. As such, I seek both to consolidate and extend the original definition of this term by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, in which they describe it as a cinematic form that specifically ‘disturbs the slumber induced by post-war reconstruction by showing us the novel message of the concentrationary system in which we have to see what it means that “everything is (now) possible”’.47 Ressources humaines begins the work of a concentrationary cinema by using a number of highly melodramatic situations in order to reanimate the tension between the ‘given and the possible’ that has, as noted above, all but disappeared in the onedimensional space of the contemporary workplace.48 The film focuses on Franck, who returns to his home town from his studies in Paris to undertake a work placement as a manager in the factory where his father works as a machine operator. His parents, and in particular his father, Jean-Claude, are extremely proud of their son’s upward social mobility, which is epitomized in their eyes when he receives a lift home from work late one night from the company director. Franck, however, clearly wears this new-found social status less enthusiastically, and his social conscience is troubled further by his inability to rekindle former friendships; he is, seemingly, unable to bridge the hierarchical divide between worker and manager. Cracks in the father-son relationship eventually emerge as a result of Franck’s prominent role in the negotiations surrounding the new thirty-five-hour working week legislation, and his refusal to mimic the passivity of his father when dealing with the company hierarchy. When Franck discovers, by chance, that the company bosses are planning a series of redundancies, which will include his father, he stages a night-time break-in to the factory with another machine operative, Alain. In a highly dramatic twist to the narrative, they weld the doors to the factory shut and expose the imminent redundancies at the entrance, so as to greet the unsuspecting workers as they arrive for work in the morning. Franck is immediately fired by his superiors, but also finds himself at odds with his father, who is angered by his son’s decision to act in contradiction to social norms. The film thus places the extremely contentious question of the thirty-five-hour working week legislation at the very centre of its narrative in order to construct highly melodramatic situations in which the tension between the ‘given and the possible’ once again becomes visible.49 The father-son conflict that lies at the heart of the film’s narrative results from the challenge to the orthodoxy of abstract labour presented by Franck on the one hand, and Jean-Claude’s perpetuation of this orthodoxy on the other. The latter in particular epitomizes the victory of conditioned doing: after spending countless hours in the factory performing the same, endless series of move-

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 155

ments in the service of his machine, Jean-Claude returns home to the workshop in his garage where he repeats an almost identical set of rituals. This tension between father and son culminates in a moment of actual confrontation between the two towards the end of the film, when Jean-Claude refuses to down tools with the rest of the workers in strike action and continues to work stubbornly at his machine. It ends, symbolically, in the metal parts being scattered dramatically across the factory floor, an effect that is accentuated by the camera, which stops to linger on them momentarily before moving on. Our awareness of the tension between the ‘given and the possible’ is thus constructed, melodramatically, in the tension between Franck and his father, and our frustration with this pathetic, forlorn figure unable to break free from his position within capitalist relations of production.50 In addition to its use of the labour legislation laws to ignite dormant tensions, the film also uses its representation of the trade union, and in particular the highly combative figure of Madame Arnoux, to interrogate the disappearance of any tension between the ‘given and possible’ within the contemporary workplace.51 As O’Shaughnessy notes in his analysis of the film, the always-outspoken union representative uses a language that is ‘highly familiar as the systemic, of class and collective struggle’.52 However, her attempts to implement any real sense of change are consistently thwarted throughout the film as she becomes increasingly isolated: even as the workers down tools and storm the space of the factory towards the film’s conclusion, bringing production to a complete standstill, the viewer is forced to question what the real implications of this direct action might be. Any sense of victory in this scene is additionally soured by the moment of conflict between Franck and Jean-Claude described above. Much like the conflict between Franck and his father, the film subsequently uses Arnoux to highlight the paradox of (im)possibility inherent in contemporary society. It reveals a society that allows pockets of controlled resistance precisely in order to distract from the real work of change that can only result from a radical restructuring of the system, and a challenge to the fundamental principle of abstract labour that underpins the system of the free market commodity exchange. Furthermore, the film demonstrates that, through this failing, the body of the trade union is ultimately complicit with, rather than resistant to, the practices of this system. In this way, the film reflects the point made by Holloway in his highly critical analysis of the trade union as a form of effective resistance to capitalism: This is the golden age of the trade unions, of the apparent reduction of the antagonism between labour and capital to annual rounds of wage negotiations, and of close relations between trade unions and states. This is the golden age of the labour movement and of all that we have seen associated with abstract labour (positivist thought, male-dominated dimorphous sexuality, the unquestioned subordination of nature to progress, the understanding of change in terms of totality identified with the state, and so

156 | matthew john

on). Full employment is the closure of the cage, the completion of the rule of unitary, abstract labour: life-activity is employment, is abstract labour, there is no alternative.53 In this sense, politics and its discourse within the film are simply performed within the terms of the everyday spectacle: instead of empowering and provoking change, ‘the political draws our fire, distracts our attention from the fundamental question of our-power-to-do’.54 Cantet himself alludes to the static, performative nature of the character roles in the film when he says that, ‘in the beginning of the film, all of the characters – the boss, the father, the son, the militant – can be viewed as “functions”’.55 The inefficacy of conventional political protest to challenge the terms of the possible is demonstrated in lucid fashion when Franck’s attempts to produce a more critical questionnaire to put to the workers, in which they have the opportunity to write open-ended answers, is instead muted by the management into a series of closed, multiple choice answers. These answers in themselves are a pertinent reminder of language functioning in the closed circuit of symbolism, or cliché, rather than the more didactic-circuit of exchange. In creating its very own language, capitalism, and the corporate culture it creates, tightens the web of structural violence, and reduces the possibility of breaking out. Cantet’s choice of title for the film, Ressources humaines, is particularly interesting in this regard: Out of this vast movement, spreading beyond workers’ organisations, the most apparent result was the emergence, in the 80s, of the new idea of ‘human resources’. In the space where the unions refused to intervene, the management and executives dreamed up a whole raft of new ideas and introduced new practices concerning how we experience and understand work: ‘corporate culture’, ‘business initiatives’, ‘organisational mobilisation’, etc, which served only to further exacerbate the gap between the ability of the management and the executives to implement their ideas on the one hand, and the ability of the trade unions to resist and strike on the other.56 Through its strategic working of the questionnaires, the film demonstrates that the Human Resources department is the absolute absence of any form of critical interrogation of the relationship between the worker and the company, one that might, for example, lead us to question the very concept of abstract labour as a dominant model within neo-liberal society. It comes to symbolize, and thus to stand in place of, corporate empathy towards its workers. As the French critic Jean-Louis Comolli notes writing on the workplace in French cinema, ‘the visible here serves as mask and makeup. What is shown obscures something else’.57 The Human Resources department, likewise, provides the visible mask of corporate responsibility behind which a complete disregard for the human can function. This paradox of the possible is

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 157

ultimately the façade behind which the violence of the concentrationary is allowed to play out.

Cinematic Work and the Politics of Representation In her reflections on the cycle of violence and vulnerability in Western society, Precarious Life, Judith Butler poses a key question for any consideration of how to resist the violence of our culture at its structural level. She asks, ‘what allows us to encounter one another?’.58 By way of response, she calls into question the rigidly hierarchical way in which we receive, and respond to, the suffering of others, and demands the conditions to mourn the loss of every human life in a way that is genuinely politicizing rather than simply performative. She theorizes this state of impassioned response through the concept of the ‘ec-static’: To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still address a ‘we,’ or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage.59 Alongside the tensions of its narrative, the film also works, at a formal level, to produce a space in which the political rage of the ec-static can emerge. It is punctuated by a number of unusual aesthetic devices that operate ‘at the interface of melodrama and, if not the documentary, the highly documented’.60 Unlike our emotional investment in the charged undercurrent of the film, these techniques force the viewer to step back, to produce an altogether more detached and critical confrontation with the human figure in the workplace. By operating alongside the fiction, the realism in the film, therefore, creates a kind of meta-language; it produces ‘a dimension of fact and meaning which elucidates the atomized phrases or words of ordinary discourse “from without” by showing this “without” as essential to the understanding of ordinary discourse.’61 As a result, it is the work of the film text itself that becomes the basis of a much more meaningful encounter with the Other and the systemic violence endured in the workplace. Furthermore, by working in synthesis with the personal focus of its narrative, it opens out a space in which we are able to recognize these lives as human in the face of a culture of work that attempts continually to efface their humanity. The political passion of the ec-static is, therefore, the kind of interaction with the work of art that Cayrol is calling for in response to our collective indifference: it allows us to recognize ourselves as socially constituted beings and active participants in the systemic violence suffered by others. Butler writes: ‘If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impinging upon them as well, and in ways that are not fully in my control or clearly predictable’?62

158 | matthew john

There is, therefore, an important distinction to be made in Ressources humaines between the representation of work in the film and the cinematic work of the text itself. This distinction is not only fundamental to resolving the generic complexity of the film, as it drifts somewhat improbably between generic modes, but is key to understanding the interaction of the political and aesthetic that forms the very basis of concentrationary art. As Marie-José Mondzain observes: In whatever form it takes, the objective of art is to move rather than to instruct. Emotion is subsequently one of its defining features rather than a by-product. It constructs the subject that feels it through their dignified position as a sentient and expressive being who is free in their judgement. The question is therefore this: what forms and devices to give the work of art so that the emotion it elicits helps to achieve a free, critical perspective.63 Cantet uses realist devices in the very heart of the melodrama precisely in order to work upon, and thereby expose, the latent ideology of the workplace. In terms of the mise-en-scène, the question of realism within Ressources humaines is immediately apparent in Cantet’s choice to shoot largely on-site within the space of the factory, and to use non-professional actors to colour the fictional elements of the film with shades of lived experience. Cantet states that ‘I like to work with non-professionals, because it’s possible for them to build a character while borrowing from aspects of their own lives’.64 In fact, the only professional actor in the production is Jalil Lespert, who plays Franck.

Figure 4.1. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). English title: Human Resources. DVD screen capture.

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 159

Cinematographically speaking, these realist devices are largely characteristic of Cantet’s filmmaking more broadly. For example, during the emotionally charged meeting at the town hall, the rough, hand-held camera-work, and shallow focus, is strongly reminiscent of Cantet’s earlier work, Entre les murs. In both films, these shots are vital to understanding the way in which Cantet allows a more critical perspective to emerge amidst a highly emotional backdrop. As O’Shaughnessy suggests, he uses ‘melodramatic situations to bring us in, but then finds ways to make us stand back so that our response is never simply emotional’.65 Another way that Cantet constructs a more critical form of spectatorship in Ressources humaines is through his repeated use of tracking shots to distance the viewer from the melodrama of the film. This device is particularly apparent in the opening sequence, which presents the viewer with an unbroken tracking shot of a foreboding, industrial landscape, out of which the menacing presence of the EDF power station at Porcheville will eventually emerge. After just over a minute of this view, the film finally cuts to an image of Franck seated beside the train window, thus indicating to the spectator, only belatedly, that his/her point of view has been a shared one. This opening scene dramatically emphasizes the shifting modes of cinematic address that will return throughout the film, and demonstrates how they operate in a synthesis of emotional melodrama and social commentary: the documentary style of these opening few minutes, which are free from protagonists and resonate with the diegetic sound of the train as it rattles though the landscape, are eventually disrupted by a shot of Franck in the train carriage that snaps us out of the initial documentary mode into a more recognizably fictional address. Our initially detached confrontation with the corporate landscape of the film, which is viewed as if from the critical lens of the documentary, is, therefore, disrupted by our realization that we had been sharing this perspective with a fictional protagonist, Franck, who will subsequently become our means of emotionally accessing the film and the industrial landscape it portrays. In the brief moment of detached observation that this tracking shot allows,

Figure 4.2. Laurent Cantet, Entre les murs, 2008 (Haut et Court, France, 50 seconds). English title: The Class. DVD screen capture.

160 | matthew john

Figure 4.3. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 1 minute, 00 seconds. DVD screen capture.

however, the spectator is conscious of the dominant and threatening image of corporate France, and this image will thus continue to haunt and frame the narrative that follows. It is ultimately Cantet’s very deliberate use of the tracking shot within the scene that most emphatically enforces the measure of critical and emotional distance between the viewer and the film from which this reading of the film can emerge: it ensures that the film moves on a fixed axis and is, therefore, very literally, restricted from moving any closer to the subject of corporate enterprise it films. As Jacques Rivette reminds us in his critical comments on Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Kapo, the choice not to move any closer is ultimately always a political one.66 This initial horizontal, tracking movement of the camera is repeated again as Franck enters the space of the factory for the first time later in the film. Here, the camera follows his movement along the assembly line, Franck on one side, the camera on the other, in an unbroken shot lasting some forty-five seconds. Subsequently, when Franck momentarily disappears from view, as the camera passes behind one of the huge machines, the viewer is left alone in a documentary-style interrogation of the assembly line that evokes the opening shots of the film. These moments of isolated documentary spectatorship, together with the steady, unbroken movement of Cantet’s camera along the assembly line, are strongly reminiscent of the opening shot from Godard’s British Sounds with which I began. The overtly political nature of the tracking shot in Godard’s filmmaking has been noted, amongst others, by Brian Henderson, who suggests that, ‘the essence of Godard’s tracking shot is its critical distance from what it surveys’.67 I suggest that the tracking shot operates in a comparable

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 161

fashion in Ressources humaines, creating a political economy based on a critical and emotional distance from the image. This comparison with British Sounds highlights another key realist mode used by Cantet throughout Ressources humaines: his recourse to diegetic sounds, and in particular, the crude sounds of machinery that are used to assault the senses of the spectator. The violent immediacy of these sounds is experienced outside of the diegesis and the world of the film itself. This is particularly apparent during Franck’s initial journey along the assembly line, mentioned above, where his encounter is as much aural as it is visual, and this experience is shared by our own spectatorship of the film. Before Franck even enters the workspace, however, the film cuts to the factory interior, and to a medium close-up of a door that is entirely covered by a poster reading: ‘Méfiez Vous d’un Mécanisme Inconnu’ (Beware of Unfamiliar Machinery). Our visual confrontation with the poster is framed initially by the ominous, diegetic sounds of the machinery, which, through its almost deafening violence, seems only to accentuate the comment about the threat of technology being made here. When Franck does finally enter the factory, he lets the door close behind him, thus framing him momentarily by the warning. This moment subsequently highlights the inherent suspicion with which Franck will view the factory and provides a moment of direct address to the viewer with which to read our own confrontation with the space of the factory. In choosing to frame the scene in this way, Cantet ensures that our first encounter with the factory is aural rather than visual, thus reinforcing the important economy between what is seen and what is heard in Ressources humaines. This careful economy

Figure 4.4. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins). Still from 9 minutes, 10 seconds. DVD screen capture.

162 | matthew john

Figure 4.5. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 9 minutes, 17 seconds. DVD screen capture.

of sight and sound in the film is equally present in the opening sequence analysed above, which begins with a prolonged confrontation with the darkened screen of the credits.68 The film thus introduces the viewer, or in this case listener, initially to the sounds of the film. I would argue that these moments of play on the traditional economy of sight and sound within Ressources humaines are important in understanding the way in which our spectatorship is informed by the politically impassioned response of the ec-static: the use of sound forces the spectator to step back momentarily from a purely emotional investment in the melodrama, to engage with the social commentary about the systemic violence of the workplace. This is used with particularly forceful effect in a scene towards the end of the film when Franck makes an emotional appeal to his mother: as the two sit together inside the family home, the diegetic sounds of the machinery from Jean-Claude’s garage haunt the familial image, and speak, symbolically, to the harmful presence of the factory within the domestic space. In addition to the more obvious visceral effects that these diegetic sounds produce, the use of sound here provides a very pertinent example of how Cantet blends the personal and the social to create a synthesis of the two, and, as I will demonstrate, this interdependence between the melodramatic and the social is key to my interpretation of the film as a form of concentrationary art. Finally, the film incites a form of ec-static spectator by balancing the searching movements of its camera with moments of idleness and pause, which equally support a reading of the inherently dehumanizing logic of the workplace. For example, as Franck meets his father at his machine for the first time, the film very deliberately

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 163

cuts to inside the glass fronting of the machine so that Franck’s spectatorship of his father’s performance in the service of technology is, therefore, doubled by our own. Furthermore, as Jean-Claude goes on to make an empty boast to his son about the piece rate that can be achieved by the machine working at full capacity, Cantet cuts to a close up of Jean-Claude’s hands operating the machinery, as if to remove the human entirely from the process and highlight the collapsed space between human and machine. In this moment, it is ultimately the idleness of the camera that serves to highlight the synthesis of movement between man and machine, thus providing a uniquely visual representation of the process of bodily dispossession at the heart of industrial capitalism and its system of production. Even when Franck has departed from the frame, the film lingers momentarily with the figure of Jean-Claude, and his endless, repetitive movements, simply to accentuate this pathetic image of the human in the service of the machine. One is reminded, in this moment of pause, of Albert Camus’s comments about Sisyphus: The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour’.69 By blurring any distinction between man and machine, Ressources humaines thus dramatically underscores the changing nature of the workplace from the assembly lines and masses of workers that characterized the height of Fordism, to the increasingly automated production of the post-Fordist landscape characteristic of the film. In fact, the film’s somewhat disdainful framing of the relationship between worker and machine in this moment actually subverts the traditional relationship between the cinema, the machine and the human body that Comolli describes as an eroticized fusion.70 Rather than an empowering and majestic dance between man and machine, the film presents us with its disempowered and passive subject. As such, it suggests that the real threat to the human is perhaps not in full automation, but in this moment of transition between the Fordist and post-Fordist workplace: here the worker, not yet fully replaced, is forced to perform the work of the machine. Ressources humaines is thus an important cinematographic example of the everevolving demands placed on the worker at the service of technology and the everevolving nature of the workplace itself within the differing phases of late and neoliberal capitalism: A more thorough analysis of the worker’s lot reveals that any dead time has disappeared, and that ‘the work rate’, (that is to say the amount of time spent on the assembly line, dedicated to the actual process of construction, assembly or production [formerly reduced by time spent moving around, gathering materials, by rest or reprieve]) is much more relentless than in

164 | matthew john

Figure 4.6. Laurent Cantet, Ressources humaines, 1999 (La Sept ARTE and Haut et Court, France, 82 mins.). Still from 11 minutes, 30 seconds. DVD screen capture.

the past since there is now no chance of breaking free from the rhythm, no chance, even fleeting, of relinquishing oneself individually or collectively from the demands of the company. The main goal, subjectively speaking, is to endure, that is to say to survive in both the long and the short-term.71

‘New Realism’ and ‘Concentrationary Realism’ With its focus on work and the workplace, Ressources humaines provides a consistent, and indeed familiar, yardstick with which to measure its political credentials. It signals the once again urgent question of labour as a meaningful form of political commitment in post-1995 French cinema, and, in-so-doing, speaks to a number of other films that equally turn their critical attention in this direction.72 The work of Comolli has been particularly instrumental in mapping this trend, and its notable prevalence amongst the documentary form.73 Given the overtly committed nature of its content, Ressources humaines has been contextualised as a form of ‘new realism’, and ascribed to what O’Shaughnessy calls a ‘return of the social’ within contemporary French filmmaking.74 Although I do not contest these readings of the film per se, I would argue that the specific blend of the melodramatic and the social in the film can be better contextualised through Cayrol’s notion of a ‘concentrationary realism’, that is to say, a generic mode that continually disrupts and excites the surface of the everyday to expose the concentrationary logic lurking just beneath the surface. In his discussion of concentrationary art in Lazare parmi nous, Cayrol asks, ‘Can it be capable of sketching out a kind of concentrationary literature, thus creating the

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 165

characters for a new Inhuman Comedy, and, to use a word that is in fashion, a concentrationary realism for every scene of our private lives?’75 Through its very specific mobilization of genre, Ressources humaines demonstrates that the workplace is one such scene of our everyday lives where its emotion and tension are always framed, and to some extent even driven by, the logic of the concentrationary that underpins them. Furthermore, reading the film as an instance of ‘concentrationary realism’ allows for a more revealing interpretation of the nature of political cinema in the post1995 period. In his analysis of political commitment in this period, O’Shaughnessy argues that, unlike the much more clearly defined traditions of committed cinema of the past, which draw their battle lines across the familiar questions of class, race, gender or sexuality, the treatment of social issues in the contemporary period are, ‘fundamentally ambiguous due to the lack of an overarching oppositional project that would provide us a clear gauge against which to judge the progressive credentials of films’.76 Given the overtly political nature of the film’s subject matter, it would be easy to limit the social credentials of Ressources humaines to its treatment of work and the workplace. As I have demonstrated, however, such a reading of the film is facile and, more importantly, misses the more profound political questions about the human in late capitalist and emerging neoliberal society at play within the context of work. Reading the film as a form of ‘concentrationary realism’, on the other hand, allows us to deepen our understanding of the nature of its political commitment beyond the surface level of the workplace, or indeed questions of class, race, gender or sexuality. It provides the sense of an ‘overarching oppositional project’ with which to unite the politics of this period, and ultimately allows us to identify an altogether more expansive body of political cinema across multiple sites of the everyday.77 Locating the concentrationary within these different phases of capitalist modernity ultimately provides us with a more global language with which ‘to think through the challenge of dealing with diverse, minor resistances’.78 Indeed, when it is viewed through the lens of the concentrationary, these enduring questions about human agency and thought in the face of ever-increasing mechanization become all the more urgent in that they speak so clearly to the logic of the concentrationary universe described by Rousset and Cayrol. This idea of continuity and difference that links a corpus of concentrationary realist films is visible in the aesthetic and thematic resonances between Ressources humaines and Godard’s British Sounds that I have highlighted in this chapter. This association can, and indeed should, go even further than this to encompass a whole host of politically engaged, and aesthetically dynamic, filmmakers identified across the history of French filmmaking under the shared rubric of a ‘concentrationary cinema’. Furthermore, I would argue that this association is particularly productive with regard to the tradition of French cinéma-vérité, and with Cayrol’s contemporaries, such as Alain Resnais (b.1922), Agnès Varda (b.1928), Jean-Luc Godard (b.1930), Chris Marker (b.1921) and Jean Rouch (b.1917), to name but a few. The project to expose the (concentrationary) reality that lies at the very heart of our everyday lives

166 | matthew john

resonates strongly with the underlying ethos of this tradition. Writing in ‘Pour un nouveau cinéma-vérité’, his manifesto for this new form of cinema, Edgar Morin states, ‘I am not interested in the documentary mode which preserves appearances, but rather in an active intervention which goes beyond these appearances in order to extract a dormant or hidden truth’.79 Clearly, with its use of realist techniques to cut across the melodramatic plot, Ressources humaines stages precisely this kind of intervention to reveal the hidden truth of the workplace. Making these links is, subsequently, not only productive in terms of its potential to reveal certain similarities between ostensibly very different films, thus re-framing the output of contemporary French cinema in terms of what has preceded it, but, far more importantly, allows us to locate a persistent and troubling logic that endures across political and historical contexts.

The Ec-static and Responsibility Butler’s call for an impassioned, political response to the suffering of others does not seek to eradicate autonomy, but rather to preserve it as the basis of a deeply politicised notion of community. Confronted with the isolation and immateriality of the neoliberal capitalist system, she urges us to re-appropriate our autonomy by rethinking ‘the relation between conditions and acts’ because ‘our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our “responsibility” lies in the juncture between the two’.80 By understanding collective responsibility in its relation to autonomy, Butler’s analysis of the conditions of violence in neoliberal capitalism perhaps, unexpectedly, evokes Cayrol’s theorization of the concentrationary system. Writing in the spoken text in Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard, written more than half a century earlier in the wake of the camps, Cayrol writes: ‘“I am not responsible”, says the Kapo. “I am not responsible”, says the officer. “I am not responsible” . . . So who then is responsible?’81. This question is fundamental to understanding how the logic of the concentrationary appears in neoliberal society at this very juncture between our freedom and agency as human beings and the series of preconditioned performances that constitute our daily lives, and it is one that will remain pertinent for as long as we fail to acknowledge our own responsibility in the dehumanizing logic of the concentrationary universe in its differing and diverse manifestations. If this logic is visible in the specific historical moment of the Nazi concentration camp, then my reading of Ressources humaines, through the theoretical lens of the concentrationary, demonstrates that it crystallizes within the contemporary site of the workplace, where the tension between ‘acting’ and ‘acted upon’ is inscribed not only in the mind of the worker but also in ‘the body at work, which is at once actor (as always), agent (of this particular work) and subject of a social and technological violence which governs and subdues it’.82 In the case of Ressources humaines, this space of responsibility between ‘acted upon’ and ‘acting’ can additionally be found in terms of its spectatorship at

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 167

the very interface of cinematic modes of address, as it drifts somewhat improbably between documentary and melodrama.83 If, as viewers of a film, or indeed as viewers of any work of art, we are to acknowledge and assume our political responsibility for the violence against the human being depicted, whether this be in the space of the factory, as with Resources humaines, or when faced with the ruins of the concentration camp at the end of Nuit et brouillard, our response must not be the overly invested, and therefore safely distant, emotional response more characteristic of the conventional cinematic viewer, but rather one that, following Cayrol’s call to responsibility, recognizes that the violence depicted is our own and defines the systems, structures and very fabric of the everyday world in which we live.

Matthew John is an Early Career Researcher and part-time lecturer at the University of Leeds. He completed his PhD, entitled Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics and the Camps, as part of the AHRC research project on ‘Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation’. He is the author of ‘Brushing the film against the grain: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean figure in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’, which appears in Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (2014), part of the I.B. Tauris mini-series on the concentrationary. He is now working on reading the concentrationary through the theme of work and the workplace in contemporary French cinema.

Notes 1. H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, (London: Routledge, 1991), 3. 2. R. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, (London: Rebel Press, 2006), 54. 3. See, for example, François Ruffin, Merci patron! (2016), Jean-Michel Carré, J’ai (très) mal au travail (2007), Nicolas Klotz, La question humaine (2007), Sophie Bruneau and Marc-Antoine Roudil, Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés (2005), or Laurent Cantet, L’Emploi du temps (2001). 4. J. Lane and J. Marks, ‘Introduction’, Modern & Contemporary France 19(4) (2011), 420. This direct relationship between culture and politics has been brought to light most recently with the instrumental role of the documentary Merci Patron, and its director, journalist François Ruffin, in launching the ‘Nuit debout’ movement and shaping its response to French labour laws. See in particular L. Peillon and A. Cailhol, ‘François Ruffin: “Voter PS au second tour en bon républicain, c’est fini”’, Libération 5 (2016). 5. See C. Dejours, Souffrance en France, la banalisation de l’injustice sociale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998). 6. See Y.M. Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. E. Emery, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. J. O’Brien, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 80. 8. M. O’Shaughnessy, ‘French Film and Work: The Work Done by Work-Centered Films’, Framework 53(1) (2012), 155. 9. Cantet’s second work-related film is L’Emploi du temps (2001). 10. Cayrol uses the phrase, ‘un réalisme concentrationnaire’ in Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49.

168 | matthew john

11. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 24. 12. See in particular W. Higbee, ‘Elle est où, ta place? The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent Cantet: Ressources humaines (2000) and L’Emploi du temps (2001)’, French Cultural Studies, 15(3) (2004): 235–50. 13. M. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema: Return of the social, return of the political?’, Modern and Contemporary France 11(2) (2003), 189–203. 14. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema’, 199. 15. C. Dejours, Souffrance en France, la banalisation de l’injustice sociale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 24. All translations from the original French are my own, except where otherwise stated. ‘Je me dois d’ajouter que si la banalisation du mal n’a rien d’exceptionnel, dans la mesure où elle serait sousjacente au system libéral lui-même, elle serait aussi impliquée dans les dérives totalitaires jusques et y compris le nazisme’. 16. Dejours makes a distinction in particular between Arendt’s original wording, ‘the banality of evil’, and what he calls ‘the banalization of evil’ in order to shift the focus of his analysis away from the personality traits of Eichmann himself towards the creation and perpetuation of destructive norms at a societal level. See both H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 252; and C. Dejours, Souffrance en France, la banalisation de l’injustice sociale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 155–57. 17. See H. Arendt ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review 15 (1948), 743–63 and D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946); translated as The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947) and reissued in 1951 as A World Apart. 18. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 83. 19. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 54. 20. Dejours, Souffrance en France, 24. ‘Mais alors, en quoi consistent les différences entre totalitarisme et néolibéralisme? Où passe la ligne de partage?’ 21. I use the term human condition here in its original Arendtian sense in order to distinguish a political condition of humanness from an ontological definition. 22. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166. 23. R. Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time, trans. R. Cherry and I. Patterson (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 24. 24. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 50. 25. J. Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (Paris: Éditions Fayard, 1997), 43. ‘Le vieux monstre concentrationnaire’. 26. Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 29. 27. R. Antelme, The Human Race, trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler (Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1992), 99. 28. T.J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, New Left Review 74 (2012), 71. 29. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. 30. This phrase forms the very basis of Marcuse’s thesis in the same-titled, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1991). 31. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 259. 32. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 161. 33. J. Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 97. 34. K. Marx, Capital (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2013), 19. 35. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 57. 36. Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 81. 37. Y.M. Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. E. Emery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 38. Butler, Precarious Life, 34. 39. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 109. 40. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12.

cinematic work as concentrationary art

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

| 169

Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 57. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 57. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 162. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 162. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 57. See J. Cayrol and C. Durand, Le Droit de regard (Paris: Seuil, 1963). G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog” (New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2012), 1. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. M. O’Shaughnessy, Laurent Cantet (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 66. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 181–82. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 133. R. Porton and L. Ellickson, ‘Alienated Labour’, Cinéaste 27(2) (2002), 26. Dejours, Souffrance en France, 48. ‘De ce vaste mouvement, se déployant en dehors des organisations ouvrières, le résultat le plus tangible a été l’émergence, dans les années 80, de la notion nouvelle de ressources humaines”. Là où les syndicats refusaient de s’aventurer, le patronat et les cadres forgeaient de nouvelles conceptions et introduisaient de nouvelles pratiques concernant la subjectivité et le sens du travail: culture d’entreprise, projet institutionnel, mobilisation organisationnelle, etc. accroissant de façon dramatique le fossé entre capacité d’initiative des cadres et du patronat, d’un côté, de résistance et d’action collective des organisations syndicales, de l’autre’. J.-L. Comolli, ‘Corps mécaniques de plus en plus célestes’, Images Documentaires 24 (1996), 40. ‘Le visible joue ici comme masque et maquillage. Ce qui est montré dérobe autre chose.’ Butler, Precarious Life, 49. Butler, Precarious Life, 24. O’Shaughnessy, Laurent Cantet, 87. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 184. Butler, Precarious Life, 27. M.-J. Mondzain, ‘La Shoah comme question de cinéma’, J.M. Frodon (eds), Le Cinéma et la Shoah: un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du 20e siècle (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), 32. ‘Dans quelque domaine que ce soit, l’art n’a pas pour mission d’enseigner mais d’émouvoir. L’émotion est alors non pas subie mais constituante. Elle construit celui qui l’éprouve dans sa dignité de sujet parlant, sentant et libre de juger. La question est donc plutôt celle-ci quelles formes, quelles figures donner à une création pour que l’émotion qu’elle provoque participe à la construction d’un regard et d’un jugement libre’. Porton and Ellickson, ‘Alienated Labour’, 25. O’Shaughnessy, Laurent Cantet, 87. In his famous article, Le Travelling de Kapo, the French film critic Serge Daney responds to a short article written by the director Jacques Rivette. Rivette’s original article, entitled De l’abjection, focuses on the abjection of one moment in the history of cinema, one movement amongst so many movements of the camera. The shot in question occurs in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Kapo at the moment when the camera tracks shamelessly forward to frame, and thus aestheticise, Riva’s last dying moments on the electric perimeter fence. See S. Daney, ‘Le Travelling de Kapo’, Persévérance entretien avec Serge Toubiana (Paris P.O.L, 1994), 15–39. B. Henderson, ‘Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’, Film Quarterly 24(2) (1970–71), 3. There is another strong parallel to be drawn here with Cantet’s later film, Entre les murs, which begins in much the same way. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 107. See Comolli, ‘Corps mécaniques de plus en plus célestes’, 41. Dejours, Souffrance en France, 60. ‘L’analyse plus détaillée du vécu ouvrier révèle que les temps morts ont disparu, que le “taux d’engagement” (c’est-à-dire la part du temps de présence sur la chaines,

170 | matthew john

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

consacré à des tâches directes de fabrication, de montage ou de production (une fois soustraits les temps de déplacement, d’approvisionnement, de pause ou de relâchement)) est beaucoup plus pénible que par le passé, qu’il n’existe moyen actuellement de ruser avec les cadences, aucune possibilité, même transitoire, de se dégager individuellement ou collectivement des contraintes de l’organisation. La préoccupation principale, du point de vue subjectif, c’est l’endurance, c’est-à-dire la capacité de tenir dans l’instant et dans la durée’. See introduction, endnote two. See in particular his essay ‘Travail au noir’. J.-L. Comolli, ‘Travail au noir’, Images Documentaires 37(8) (2000). See O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema’, (2003). Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 49. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema’, 199. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema’, 199. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Post-1995 French Cinema’, 192. E. Morin, ‘Pour un nouveau cinéma vérité’, E. Morin and J. Rouch (eds), Chronique d’un été (Paris: Interspectales, 1960), 30. ‘Ce qui m’intéresse, ce n’est pas le documentaire qui montre les apparences, c’est une intervention active pour aller au travers des apparences et en extraire la vérité cachée ou endormie’. Butler, Precarious Life, 16. Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard, 44. ‘Je ne suis pas responsable’ dit le kapo. ‘Je ne suis pas responsable’, dit l’officier. ‘Je ne suis pas responsible’ . . . Alors qui est responsable? J.-L. Comolli, ‘Corps mécaniques de plus en plus célestes’, 43. ‘Le corps dans le travail est à la fois acteur (comme toujours), agent (de ce travail précis) et sujet d’une violence sociale et technique qui le règle et le soumet’. Butler, Precarious Life, 16.

Bibliography Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Antelme, R. The Human Race, trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler. Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1992. Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Boutang, Y.M., Cognitive Capitalism, trans. E. Emery. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Butler, J. Precarious Life, The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, New York: Verso, 2004. Camus, A. The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. J. O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. Cayrol, J. Nuit et brouillard. Paris: Éditions Fayard, 1997. Cayrol, J. and Durand, C. Le Droit de regard. Paris: Seuil, 1963. Clark, T.J. ‘For a Left with No Future’, New Left Review 74 (2012), 53–75. Comolli, J.L. ‘Corps mécaniques de plus en plus célestes’, Images Documentaires 24 (1996), 39–49. Comolli, J.L. ‘Travail au noir’, Images Documentaires 37(8) (2000), 101–21. Daney, S. ‘Le Travelling de Kapo’, Persévérance entretien avec Serge Toubiana. Paris: P.O.L, 1994, 15–39. Dejours, C. Souffrance en France, la banalisation de l’injustice sociale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Frodon, J.M. (ed), Le Cinéma et la Shoah: un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du 20e siècle. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007. Henderson, B. ‘Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’, Film Quarterly 24(2) (1970–71), 57–65. Higbee, W. ‘Elle est où, ta place? The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent Cantet: Ressources humaines (2000) and L’Emploi du temps (2001)’, French Cultural Studies 15(3) (2004), 235–50. Holloway, J. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2010. Lane, J.F. and Marks, J. ‘Introduction’, Modern & Contemporary France 199(4) (2011), 417–26. Marcuse, H. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge, 1991. Marx, K. Capital. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2013.

cinematic work as concentrationary art

| 171

Morin, E. and J. Rouch (eds), Chronique d’un été. Paris: Interspectales, 1960. O’Shaughnessy, M. ‘Post-1995 French Cinema: Return of the social, return of the political?’, Modern and Contemporary France 11(2) (2003), 189–203. ———. ‘French Film and Work: The Work Done by Work-Centered Films’, Framework 53(1) (2012), 155–71. ———. Laurent Cantet. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Peillon, L. and A. Cailhol. ‘François Ruffin: “Voter PS au second tour en bon républicain, c’est fini”’, Libération 5 (2016). Pollock, G. and M. Silverman (eds). Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog”. New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2012. Porton, R. and L. Ellickson. ‘Alienated Labour’, Cinéaste 27(2) (2002), 24–27. Rousset, D. The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Vaneigem, R. The Movement of the Free Spirit, General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time, trans. R. Cherry and I. Patterson. New York: Zone Books, 1998. ———. Le Mouvement du Libre-Esprit, témoignages sur les affleurements de la vie à la surface du Moyen Âge, de la Renaissance et, incidemment, de notre époque. Paris: Ramsay, 1986. ———. The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press, 2006. ———. Traite de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

CHAPTER 5

After Haunting a conceptualization of the lazarean image Benjamin Hannavy Cousen

Can the Lazarean be discerned in popular culture, and furthermore, in contemporary music? What might we understand of contemporary culture if we could define a ‘Lazarean image’ in terms suggested, but exceeding the originating proposition, by French poet and deportee Jean Cayrol? In this chapter, I propose an expanded meaning of the term ‘Lazarean’ in relation to what I have elsewhere theorized as forms of the ‘concentrationary image’ that surface, or obliquely appear, in a range of cultural forms otherwise unconnected with the historical camps.1 I have previously identified three forms of the concentrationary image: citational, indexical and amnesiac.2 Each of these types produces distinct effects at the level not only of meaning but of the politics of the image in relation to cultural memory of the concentrationary menace and the failures of memory. My focus in this chapter are the lyrics of songs by Australian musician, composer and songwriter, actor and screenwriter Nick Cave (b.1957), who fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, to see how this fugitive and elusive quality of the Lazarean may be manifested critically and creatively in popular culture. Noted as a key figure in the post-punk musical scene in Australia, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, formed in 1983, have released sixteen albums of which Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) was the fourteenth. In an interview after the album’s release, Cave stated: Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatised, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ’s miracles – raising a man from the dead – but I couldn’t help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest. I’ve taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel. I was also thinking about Harry Houdini who spent a lot of his life trying to debunk the spiritualists who were cashing in on the bereaved. He believed there was nothing going on beyond the grave. He

after haunting

| 173

was the second greatest escapologist, Harry was, Lazarus, of course, being the greatest. I wanted to create a kind of vehicle, a medium, for Houdini to speak to us if he so desires, you know, from beyond the grave.3 Before addressing the Lazarean in this recent musical and lyrical incarnation, I shall situate the argument theoretically in order to highlight the need for the elaboration of terms of analysis that bridge the historical referent to a historical concentrationary universe and the present condition.

Alive Today: The Lazarean as an Image The task of writing about ‘the concentrationary universe’, as described by David Rousset in 1946, and its imaginary is one that is always dealing with or is threatened by a return.4 This seems particularly true at the time of writing the present chapter (in 2018), when global political events combined with technological advances have undermined any sense of complacency (perhaps even trust) that positive progress has been made since the hell of the concentrationary universe that existed across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) top the bestseller lists alongside Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).5 Accord seems fragile, and the technology that allows for mass resistance and mass (protest) movements is also that which enables mass surveillance and mass discrimination. Technology, as always, appears neutral whilst power is not. Shadowing this chapter is the real-life displacement of millions of people, provoking the so-called European migrant crisis. Brexit and Donald Trump have ‘happened’, proxy war and cholera devastate Yemen (the Saudi campaign is equipped with British weaponry in deals that are apparently vital to the UK economy). Despite the vigilance that concentrationary memory should incite, the United Kingdom supports at the present moment ‘detention centres’ for asylum seekers within which the law is suspended, detention is indefinite, and human beings are dismantled through fear, the removal of dignity, and, not so much injustice as the total absence of justice. On 9 October 2017, the British newspaper The Guardian ran a major piece on ‘black sites’ – secret sites of torture.6 The fact that this is happening right now, amidst the ‘frivolity’ of ‘ordinary’ life and culture in the UK, strikes right at the heart of the Concentrationary Memories project of which this publication is a product – there can be no clearer example.7 In their preface to the volume on Concentrationary Memories, Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman argued that ‘[c]oncentrationary art must be able to read the signs of the normalization of the concentrationary universe in everyday life in order to make us constantly vigilant of its ruses’.8 They go on to state that concentrationary art is a ‘political aesthetic employing the techniques of defamiliarization to allow us to read the terror in our midst’,9 thus confirming that the ‘concentrationary’ still stalks the landscapes of Europe, just as we are shown by the opening shots of Alain Resnais’s

174 | benjamin hannavy cousen

film Nuit et brouillard (1955) and throughout Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985).10 By proposing a further concept of a concentrationary imaginary, Pollock, Silverman and I have traced a less obvious and insidious seeping of the ‘concentrationary’, both as a fact of societal modernity, following Zygmunt Bauman’s challenging arguments in his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Giorgio Agamben’s contentious and now well-known assertion of the camp as the ‘nomos’ of contemporary political space, and as a decisive if hidden element within cultural production.11 In fact, it is through a very close reading of cultural forms (mostly film) that we have developed the diagnostic tools that disclose the presence of the ‘concentrationary’ in popular culture. In my work for the volume on Concentrationary Imaginaries I identified what I name the ‘concentrationary image’ – as the constituent component of the Imaginary – and argued that it makes its appearance in three main forms: the citational, the indexical and the amnesiac.12 The first two indicate ways in which we can identify a referent to the historical form or the historical archive of images associated with the concentrationary as place, icon, structure and memory. I suggested, however, that the third ‘order’ of the image, the amnesiac, appears in cultural productions that reproduce a concentrationary logic through a cynical but effectively unacknowledged ‘mining’ of the concentrationary for capitalist ideological reasons, and in doing so become severed from the specificity and meaning of the concentrationary as a political-historical referent. I also posited that the arrival of the amnesiac image represents a shift from the relative passivity of what we can understand as the seeping of the concentrationary into cultural forms, to a more active amnesia, what I named the ‘creep’ of the concentrationary, wherein the ideology of capitalist production deploys the concentrationary in a cynical and appalling way by detaching it from its function as memory. As an example of this I analysed the film, Shutter Island (Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010), in which the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US military forces in 1945 (documented in filmed footage by George Stevens) is presented in false piety merely to further the frisson of the film’s gothic, noir-ish plot involving a convicted murderer suffering from hallucinations of his unremembered action pierced from time to time by surfacing memories of his time as a GI who witnessed horrors during the liberation of Dachau. In my argument I proposed that the citational, indexical and amnesiac images are overlapping orders of representation that are the evidence of the presence of the concentrationary as image within films. The citational has a constant connection with visual representations of the concentrationary universe such as the ‘liberation’ footage and photographs taken at the end of World War II. It also tends to be a recycling of these images (or likenesses of them) that are redeployed as pre-digested signifiers that often confuse the concentrationary and exterminatory universes by conflating concentration camps (known through Allied liberation photographs and films) with evocations of the industrial, racialized genocide that took place in camps in Poland and by direct killing in Ukraine, Belarus, Lativa and Lithuania, generally called the Holocaust, for which there is almost no surviving direct visual documentation. The

after haunting

| 175

indexical image is a manifestation of an embedded relationship between cultural production and the society from which the concentrationary emerges. In practice, this means that images that do not look as if they have anything to do with the historical concentrationary universe may be, on closer examination, indexical of the existence, and persistence of this universe. Reading such images requires more than analysis of recurring visual tropes; the focus is on the normalization of the logic of the concentrationary in relation to dehumanization and arbitrary death. The amnesiac image is even harder to define for it raises questions of the mode of its production: ‘It occurs in a realm of pure cinematic product where the special effect trumps any genuine affect and society is not so much reflected as erased and produced again in the ideological terms of cinematic frisson.’13 In this chapter, I extend my argument to suggest that what Jean Cayrol proposed as a ‘Lazarean postulate’ potentially presents us with a fourth mode of return in the concentrationary image – the Lazarean.14 Unlike the three other forms of the concentrationary image I have named above, the Lazarean operates as a mode of resistance to, rather than complicity with, dissemination of, or wilful misremembering of the concentrationary. The Lazarean, as I am using it in this chapter, introduces specifically a quality of resistance that is related to the idea of the Lazarean returnee and that may be identified in Lazarean images. It is important to stress, therefore, that the Lazarean in this case is not interchangeable with the ‘concentrationary’ itself. The argument is that a Lazarean image has formal ties with the amnesiac image, whilst actually symbolizing the opposite; it lacks the essential poverty of the amnesiac image. Of course, it has its own specificities that, when examined, may help us to understand the workings of both more fully. The Lazarean image can be read as both a response to the world of the amnesiac image and a natural result of it. How can we interpret this troubling figure of the ‘Lazarean’ while interrogating it as a model for thought? I am suggesting that the Lazarean is a particular way that an image can appear. ‘Appearance’, however, might give the wrong impression, given its proximity to ‘apparition’ and hence the ghostly. Although the concentrationary as image haunts cultural production, the Lazarean itself is precisely not a ghost. Rather, I would like to situate and comprehend it within the traceable history of biopolitics initiated by Michel Foucault and continued by Giorgio Agamben, who was bemused by the fact that Foucault ‘never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp’.15 The Lazarean body can be situated in the genealogy of biopolitics and what Agamben calls ‘bare life’. As a literary figure adopted from the fourth Christian Gospel of John by Jean Cayrol, Lazarus changes the rules by having somehow ‘passed through’ death, and existing as a real body despite having ‘died’. The radical intervention of Cayrol is to suggest that those who have passed through the camps have also, in a profoundly psychological passage mediated by time and physical torture, passed through death. His ‘Lazarean postulate’ might thereby be introduced to bridge two aspects of Agamben’s study of the camps: the figure of the Muselmann (described by Primo Levi as

176 | benjamin hannavy cousen

the living corpse ‘produced’ by the regime of malnutrition and overwork in the slave labour and concentration camps) as a manner of ‘living death’, and a biopolitical situation where that very camp is the political ‘nomos’ of our times. Lazarus is neither Muselmann nor political norm. Lazarus is the uncanny element that, in the name of resistance, shines a disturbing light on both. The reason for situating Lazarus firmly within a biopolitical discourse is to emphasize the fact that Lazarus is not the Kristevan ‘non-subject’, even though the Lazarean uncomfortably suggests the abjection of the corpse (because a subject has become like a corpse before becoming a returnee to subjecthood) that is one of the key sites for Kristeva of the abject confrontation that can shatter the subject’s own sense of clean, living self.16 The Lazarean is not animated death and, therefore, not a zombie (in spite of Cayrol’s observation that ‘from 1943 camp inmates referred to themselves as the “living-dead”, did they not?’).17 The Lazarean is, instead, a figure who, having experienced the non-I-ness of death, challenges (accuses?) us directly through still being alive or amongst the living once again. Taking Cayrol’s literary figure into the realm of cultural dissemination in visual and, as we shall see, lyric-musical terms, the Lazarean image – which must have some quality of ‘being alive once again’ – enables us to think about the impact of the concentrationary in debates about the politics of the aesthetics of terror and horror. Yet we also have an immediate problem. It may well be that the Lazarean image is not so much a pre-identifiable image, or an already recognizable motif or moment in a film, song, or picture. Instead, it could represent a contingent ‘quality’, the contingency of which involves the production, the moment of presentation and the reception of the image forming a ‘whole’, but which requires even greater vigilance to discern. It may, in the end, make more sense to speak of the Lazarean as a quality that can be found across a number of different images. I will cautiously state that the Lazarean is the moment of direct witness. The Lazarean is not bound in endless calcification to the past but can be brought back to life in the moment when it exists again. It is not merely a ghostly trace that petitions for redress. Any Lazarean image would, therefore, also have features of a particular quality of ‘nowness’ and presence, but it is not detached from history and memory in the manner of the amnesiac image. The Lazarean image or disturbance is a kind of representation that directly becomes ‘presence’ as a living memory. The citational, indexical and amnesiac images may themselves deliver Lazarean flickers, managing to provoke further work or investigation in the viewer that may itself become concentrationary memory work. Yet these three modes of image are essentially impoverished in comparison to the hypothetical Lazarean image. The Lazarean is memory in the sense described by cultural theorist of memory politics Andreas Huyssen: The temporal status of any act of memory is always the present and not, as some naive epistemology would have it, the past itself, even though all

after haunting

| 177

memory in some ineradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience. It is this tenuous fissure between past and present that constitutes memory, making it powerfully alive and distinct from the archive or any other mere system of storage and retrieval.18 Whereas the capitalist modes that produce images and mine memory for their own ends seek to smooth over this fissure between past and present, and keep the viewer satisfied and asleep (or disturbed but still asleep within the logic of consumerism),19 the witness moment of the Lazarean produces defamiliarization and disturbance in that same space. Perversely, although it is a witness to death, such defamiliarization and disturbance are, in fact, a call to the bravery of life. The Lazarean might then be defined as both ethical and affective. Whether it can be pinned down and defined beyond this is another question. Somehow, its proof may lie in its evasiveness. In conjunction with the exterminatory event of industrialized, state-sponsored genocide that led Theodor Adorno to name our epoch ‘after Auschwitz’, the concentrationary as the instrument of totalitarianism has been defined by writers from Rousset to Arendt as a historical event after which nothing is the same again. Yet we are not always fully aware of the radical nature of the changes that persist and subtend our present. So, there is a need for resistance to, or interruption of the flow of, the normalized consumption of the present. And this is, perhaps, how we should look for the Lazarean image – an intervention into the flow. It is an intervention into all those moments of the apparatus of cinema or cultural production that seek to suture the viewer into pure, thoughtless consumerism. It might even function in ways comparable to Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ – that flashes up to enable us to see the condition of capitalist reality. The Lazarean is distinctive, however, because (and this is central to my argument) it is infused by witness. Finally, the Lazarean provides something positive in opposition to the negativity of the deadening shock of the news media, as described by Paul Virilio: Like the mass media, which no longer peddle anything other than obscenity and fear to satisfy the ratings, contemporary nihilism exposes the drama of an aesthetic of disappearance . . . visions of every kind of excess, starting with advertising outrages that ensure the succès de scandale without which the conditioning of appearances would immediately stop being effective. 20 By contrast, the Lazarean image does not invoke any new obscenity beyond that to which it testifies.

I am Spartacus (or Lazarus) Reference to the miracle of Lazarus appears in Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘The Concentration Camps’, published in Partisan Review in December 1948.21 There she writes:

178 | benjamin hannavy cousen

‘The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e. men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus.’22 What does Arendt mean by this? She is quite precise as to the essential effects of being a concentration camp internee: ‘The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character.’23 She is also very confident of the restorative ‘Lazarean’ aspect of such a person’s ‘resurrection’: ‘When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it.’24 What Arendt is saying, I take it, is that a human being retains, or more precisely regains, his/her essence after ‘returning from the dead’ so that, as has been said, the Lazarean is neither ghost nor a zombie but is an integrated human being with an accumulation of extreme experiences behind him/her (leaving aside, just for a moment, the effects of trauma). It is, however, difficult to know whether Arendt is right about this, certainly at the level of her analogy. Do we know that Lazarus was the same as before or suffered no change in personality? In the Gospel of John, Lazarus is mentioned twice after he is raised from the dead, and the first time he does seem to be behaving pretty normally: ‘Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honour . . . Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him’ (John 12:2). It seems that Lazarus displayed the outward signs of social reintegration at least. Of course, a difference has occurred – the difference of the dual experience of having been dead and having ‘risen from the dead’. And what makes the individual with such experience dangerous and troubling in the world is the fact that s/he is a witness to that experience – something that strikes at the heart of the study of concentrationary memories. Whereas the citational image presents and recycles stock images from the paucity of the archive (the very scarcity of which speaks to the desire to leave no traces), the indexical points, often Quixotically, towards conditions that are hidden and unchanged, and the amnesiac gathers all this up and reframes it for its own ends, the Lazarean image retains the integrity of the witness, embodying genuine traces and the ability to testify. So far in this analysis, the Lazarean is exclusive to the experience and the witness of s/he who has actually been there. Following Arendt’s thoughts in her essay, however, when we begin to identify the Lazarean concentrationary image, a separation may begin to occur from the witness into something more vicarious: Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyses everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about such horrors.25 The inevitability of time passing beyond the lives of actual witnesses, coupled with the fact that the world has not disowned the concentrationary universe and disrupted the concentrationary logic of modernity, means that a certain stepping up to the plate is necessary by those whose imagination, if not their direct experiences,

after haunting

| 179

have been aroused by the reports of history. It almost becomes an obligation of those who are witnesses to the witnesses, to testify about what the witness has seen. If, as Primo Levi asserts, those whom we might think of as witnesses, namely survivors, were/are, in fact, not true witnesses (‘Those . . . who saw the Gorgon . . . the submerged, the complete witnesses’26), the space of what we might, for immediate purposes, call the ‘tertiary’ witness is the space, perhaps, within which the Lazarean appears and operates. This has a relationship with the mediated world of cultural production, whereby the world is remade to various degrees of good or bad faith through art, film and literature. What is specific about the concentrationary image in this way of thinking is that it must be acknowledged that, because of the appearance in the world of the concentrationary universe, the world was fundamentally changed. Rousset puts this most succinctly when he declared that in that universe, and because it has existed, ‘everything is possible’.27 Despite the truth in arguments that the concentrationary is deeply symmetrical, if never totally identified, with the modernity within which it is couched, it is also a rupture in this flow that fundamentally changes the make-up of the world that follows. There is a parallel here with the Biblical story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead where there is a direct intervention, Christians would say, by an incarnate God that also says, in a very different way, that ‘everything is possible – even life beyond death’.28 This brings us to the second mention of post-death Lazarus in John’s Gospel – where we find him with his life under threat once more, not, this time, through sickness, but because the priests wish to kill him for the very fact he is a witness. It is too late for the priests, however: ‘Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word.’ (John 12:17). Reading this at a very basic level, the bearing of witness became uncontainable for the priests because of the sheer weight of numbers but these are the bystander witnesses. In my earlier work on the concentrationary imaginary I have argued that those who engage in cultural production in a world after the concentrationary are, to a degree, haunted by it. The ghosts that are conjured up through the productions of the citational, indexical and amnesiac images are restless hauntings, unsatisfactory and censorable. They fail to bear witness and become, instead, in varying degrees, symptoms. They are destined to repetition because ghosts are always restlessly seeking redress for injustice.29 It is to be hoped that concentrationary memory-work performs such redress in some way when applying its critical thinking to cultural productions. The Lazarean image, if it is possible to identify it, may be a witness image that needs no such (or requires less) critical intervention to exorcise it because its quality of ‘presence’ carries its own explanation and clarity. It is, therefore, useful not to abandon the form and the text of the Lazarus ‘miracle’ because it helps us to formulate an idea of the Lazarean image beyond the mere notion of a ‘return’. Certainly, it is not a ‘return of the repressed’, and strictly speaking, I am arguing, the Lazarean image is unrelated to the ‘uncanny’ in and of itself. There is no sense of doubt as to whether something that should not be alive is, in fact, living.

180 | benjamin hannavy cousen

Writing on the uncanniness of automata such as mechanical dolls, Freud explicitly makes this point: ‘the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny’.30 It may be possible that a sense of uncanniness may arise from some of the things on which the Lazarean image can throw a light. So, once again, the Lazarean image is a witness (shining a light), directly and in good faith. It is not, thereby, any kind of citation (recycling the archive), index (requiring extra effort of interpretation) or amnesia (cynical and in bad faith).

He Knew How to Bring ’em on Back to Life It is no coincidence that it is the Christian story of Lazarus that was the starting point for Søren Kierkegaard’s exposition of the Self in The Sickness Unto Death (1849), an analysis of despair and consequent celebration of selfhood that builds its argument around Christ’s words, spoken on hearing that Lazarus is ill: ‘this sickness will not end in death’.31 What follows in the Christian Gospel is counterintuitive: Jesus appears to deliberately delay returning to Lazarus in Judea, an interval during which Lazarus dies. Jesus arrives at the tomb four days after Lazarus has been laid in it. There is a hint of reproach in the text that he did not arrive earlier. ‘But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’ (John 11:37). He arrives at a scene of mourning and, when reaching the tomb, his reaction is encapsulated in the famous sentence, ‘Jesus wept’. Three sentences later, just before the miracle is ‘performed’, Jesus is said to be ‘once more deeply moved’ (John 11:38). There are several aspects of this that are worth thinking about when assessing what qualities a Lazarean image might possess. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard states, ‘The Self is freedom’, in setting up a troubling relational aspect of the self that relates to itself and, therefore (and unavoidably), to an other.32 The non-despairing self, which, we may take it, is Lazarean (because of not falling into despair or death), is on the side of life having been through death and is, therefore, in the realm of the relational. The bravery of relationship and relational politics, anathema to totalitarianism, is an aspect of the Lazarean. Unlike the amnesiac image (which is solely unrelational, presents us with a fait accompli and is ideologically preconditioned), relational politics, and therefore the Lazarean, are less easily interpolated into ideology in advance because, if for no other reason, the unpredictable nature of moving into relationship. The evidence for this relational aspect is the mourning that occurs in the Christian text of the Lazarus story. Jesus wept. Jesus was moved. Perhaps the Lazarean image must be able to elicit or contain some sense of emotion and affect. It contains within it a sense of affective mourning whilst not necessarily being the actual work of mourning to which it points. This is in line with what Cayrol says: We testify to the soul’s invulnerability throughout all of its suffering and agony. It is always able to find its way back to its ‘natural element’, despite

after haunting

| 181

the enormous hands of a giant and inhuman history. It knows how to slip through its fingers like an eel longing for its river water. It has no fear of leaving its temporary mortal coil, for it will take on an even more wonderful form; it is endlessly reborn, for mass graves for the soul do not exist, as far as we know.33 Relational politics travel in multiple directions; it may be the case that Lazarean images cannot exist without the attuned Lazarean consciousnesses (concentrationary memories) that can discern them as such. It is a necessary work, on the part of the receivers of the image, to become, a witness themselves, something that involves a capacity for observational detachment. For instance in ‘Red River Shore’ by Bob Dylan on his album Tell Tale Signs (Bootleg Series Vol. 8), a propos of nothing, an allusion to Lazarus comes into the song about a long lost girl.34 Dylan is clearly referencing a miracle performed by ‘a man full of sorrow and strife’ (Jesus) on someone who was dead and is brought back to life, while puzzling about what words might be used to do so, and if such miracles happen nowadays. The sense of being dead and resurrected slips swiftly into an existential pain at feeling invisible, unseen except by a woman on the title’s Red River Shore. The language of resurrection is lost to the world, but it does not seem to matter; it is enough to bear witness to the story of ‘the kind of thing’ they used to do (resurrect the dead), especially in a scenario where it seems the narrator of the song is being unwitnessed except by the, possibly, mythical, girl. To bear witness, to be relational, (to be full of ‘sorrow’) with others and also in the sense of relating what we have seen and what we have heard, is perhaps the primary lesson of the concept of the Lazarean. Something of the Lazarean image is co-created between the image maker and the receiver.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! It is because of the fugitive nature of the Lazarean that I do not wish to pin it down to one particular sequence or screenshot in a movie. To point out a visual example would be a judgment that will set up an unwarranted precedent. In order to explore this further, however, and to formulate a taxonomy of the Lazarean image, I want to offer some readings as suggestive examples. In the preceding discussion, I have proposed qualities of the Lazarean image that run beyond the specifics of those posited by Cayrol. In this section, the two will be brought closer together. The images I want to use this time are not from films but rather the lyrics of some songs by the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave and his band The Bad Seeds, probably most well-known in the popular perception as a postpunk outfit preoccupied by neo-gothic and religious themes.35 Cave’s lyrics have, in the last fifteen years, made consistent references that read like citational and indexical images of the concentrationary universe. It is as if moments from the visual image bank of the twentieth century are quoted or cited in the songs and I suggest that there

182 | benjamin hannavy cousen

is an inevitability about this. For example, in both the double album Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre of Orpheus (2004) and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008), the lyrics of the songs are threaded through with an uneasy consciousness that, I suggest, can be ascribed to the seepage of the concentrationary into popular cultural forms. Because the condition of modernity contains the concentrationary within its structure, Cave’s songs instantiate the ways in which these conditions become visible. It is as if there are moments where the surface gloss is scratched, and the true condition becomes clear (or seeps to the surface like an oil slick). In the title track of Abattoir Blues, the lyrical sequence of the first two verses is as follows: The sun is high up in the sky and I’m in my car Drifting down into the abattoir Do you see what I see dear? The air grows heavy, I listen to your breath Entwined together in this culture of death Do you see what I see dear? Slide on over here, let me give you a squeeze To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory Can you hear what I hear, babe? Does it make you feel afraid? Everything’s dissolving, babe, according to plan The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed I woke up this morning with a frappucino in my hand36 The evocation of traveling across a wider landscape, juxtaposed and intermixed with the more personal and intimate, is symptomatic of the cultural rendering of the concentrationary haunting (the ‘terror in our midst’). It even echoes Cayrol’s words in the opening sequence of Nuit et brouillard (‘Même un paysage tranquille . . . même une route où passent des voitures’37). Entwined in it all is this ‘culture of death’, and heaps of bodies. What Jacques Rancière has called the ‘great parataxis’38 is evidenced by the heaped bodies mentioned in the same breath as the frothiness of a frappucino (could the meta-voice of the song, that which lays all this out, be regarded as partaking of Lazarean witness?). The standard opening of the blues ‘I woke up this morning’, is undercut by the banality of capital excess (I take it this is what is represented by the frappucino), which is itself flatly laid alongside images of death that recall, for example, allied liberation footage from Belsen. The cultural sweep of these lines is vast, but it is countered by the sickening levelling of meaning that is also occurring here. Nowhere is this paratactical mélange of ‘ordinary horror’ couched more in the fabric of the everyday than in the News, something that opens the (love) song ‘Nature Boy’, also on Abattoir Blues:

after haunting

| 183

I was just a boy when I sat down To watch the news on TV I saw some ordinary slaughter I saw some routine atrocity39 The portrayal of the world in these songs is one that conforms to the theory of concentrationary seepage into the normality of the everyday. The images are indexical and to a secondary degree citational. They are not amnesiac because Cave’s ‘meta’ voice is not one that is designed to suture the listener into mindless consumption. Even when the tune is somewhat smooth (as in ‘Abattoir Blues’), the juxtaposition of this with the lyrical content is designed to produce a jolt of disturbance. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the uncanny is prominent in the landscapes Cave creates (more than once there are direct references to the figure of the ‘Sandman’, Freud’s ‘disturber of love’40). In a number of songs, a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape is invoked, that is not only futuristic in the manner of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 but, like Vonnegut’s text (which it perhaps directly references), infected and inescapably tied to the ruined landscapes of the past (but of course it is also now): I came up from out of the meat-locker The city was gone.41 Any invocation of Mary Shelley, of course, summons up one of the most uncanny figures of all – Frankenstein’s monster. In some ways, these images measure up to what Cayrol suggested is required from a Lazarean text: ‘A Lazarean text must bear witness to this overflowing agony which the whole of Europe has known in its exoduses, ghettoes, cellars and famines’.42 I suggest, however, that a reading can be made of these songs that can elucidate how the images of which they are made up show us a shift from one type of image to another – to the Lazarean as a form of vital resistance that I described in the first part of this chapter, that is, a move from the citational, indexical and amnesiac forms of uncanny spectres of the undead concentrationary, to a form of the Lazarean. Appropriately, it is the title track Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! that provides an embodiment of some of the qualities of the Lazarean image. In this strange and disconcerting song, described by popular music scholar D. Ferrett as ‘gothic/garage rock with a dark blues spiritual edge’,43 the uncanny is replaced by an alive presence that is no less disturbing or defamiliarizing. Here are the lyrics of a couple of verses of the song in an approximation of how they appear in the CD liner notes: dig yourself, LAZARUS!!!!!! DIG YOURSELF, LAZARUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! dig yourself, LAZARUS!!!!!!! (dig yourself back in that hole) (Chorus)

184 | benjamin hannavy cousen

Larry made his nest up in the autumn branches built from nothing but high hopes & thin air he collected up some BABY – BLASTED mothers they took their chances & for a while lived quite happily up there he came from NEW YORK CITY, but couldn’t take the pace (thought it was like DOGGY – DOG – WORLD) then he went to SAN FRANCISCO (spent a year in outer space) w/ a sweet little san franciscan girl I can hear my mother wailing & a whole lot of scraping of chairs!!!!!!! I don’t know what it is but there is definitely something going on upstairs…. I!!!! WANT!!!!! Y/!!!!! TO!!!!!!!!!! DIG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! well NEW YORK CITY, man SAN FRANCISCO, LA (I don’t know) Larry grew increasingly neurotic & obscene!!!!!!!!!! HE NEVER ASKED TO BE RAISED UP FROM THE TOMB no one ever actually asked him to forsake his DREAMS!!! anyway, to cut a long story short fame finally found him mirrors became his torturers cameras snapped him at every chance the women all went back to their homes & their hus – bands (secret smiles in the corner of their mouths) he ended up like so many of them do back on the streets of NEW YORK CITY!!!!!!! in a soup queue/ a dope fiend/ (a slave) then prison/ then the madhouse/ then the grave O POOR LARRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! but what do we really know of the dead &who actually cares????????!!!!! I don’t know what it is

after haunting

| 185

but there is definitely something going on upstairs dig yourself, LAZARUS!!!!!! DIG YOURSELF, LAZARUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! dig yourself, LAZARUS!!!!!!!! (dig yourself back in that hole) I!!!! WANT!!!!! Y/!!!!!!!! TO!!!!!!!! DIG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!44 In this song, Lazarus himself is brought into a pure presence, but he is attached to a past that consists only of his pre-resurrected being, his autumn (seasonally out of joint) ‘nest’ can be built of nothing but ‘high hopes and thin air’. He appears to function only through some kind of fragile sensory experience and hollow expenditures of energy. It is a confusion, a restlessness and a bizarre world-straddling solitude within which he appears to exist. In this respect (but not every respect), this is not entirely unlike the Lazarean figure described by Cayrol: ‘A Lazarean text will first and foremost be one that meticulously describes the strangest kind of solitude man will ever be capable of bearing. This is not a solitude for which there is a way out or exit’.45 This seems to describe what happens to the Lazarus, or Larry, of Cave’s song. As Cave said in the interview I quoted from at the beginning of this chapter: Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ’s miracles – raising a man from the dead – but I couldn’t help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest.46 The inability of Lazarus to live properly in the newly invigorated moment (and the song should be listened to or heard live to understand that there is an invigoration in the performance that is impossible to convey through the written lyrics) is countered by the very fact of this aliveness and invigoration in the song itself. On the surface level, Cave’s Lazarus enacts precisely what Cayrol requires of the Lazarean: ‘This is an active solitude, not one of vague melancholy or ennui, as the romantics would have it. It is a living, moving solitude, and though it may devour the individual.’47 It is not insignificant that Cave’s Lazarean protagonist is not geographically confined. It is not, however, on the level of the content of the song’s lyrics that I primarily wish to present it as an example of a form of image creation that is Lazarean and concentrationary resistance. Instead, it is as a kind of fugitive quality of embodiment (returning us to the Agambenian biopolitical discourse). Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! IS the Lazarean, it barely has to describe Lazarus for us to know that the content and the form of the song is shot through with a presence that squirms and makes us squirm because of the sort of elucidation it can provide and with which we would have to live. This version of the Lazarean is creative and embodies the need to make something new, not repeat or fall into old neural, well-worn and repetitive pathways. Such a version of the Lazarean is a culmination of the biopolitical discourse that exists

186 | benjamin hannavy cousen

because the camps are not the end of the story. The survivor and we who are witness to the survivor and produce art, music and films, are called upon to allow such a vitality to exist. It is the injunction not to produce dead art. Sartre’s essay on the phenomenology of the imagination, L’Imaginaire, can help to elucidate how this hard-to-pin-down quality functions. Sartre makes a distinction between the idea of consciousness being like a stage upon which images arrive and leave like actors in a play (a version Sartre denies), and the idea that an image is consciousness in the moment it exists (i.e. there is no stage): We must drop these spatial metaphors. The image is a consciousness which is sui generis, which can in no way form part of a larger consciousness. There is no image in a consciousness which contains it, in addition to the thought, signs, feelings and sensations.48 Sartre also describes the consciousness of the image as being ‘not at all like a piece of wood floating on the sea, but like a wave among waves’.49 I suggest that we can use this image of the image to conceive of a Lazarean image that differs from the Cayrolian Lazarean protagonist who does, in fact, appear in a landscape in the manner of a piece of wood floating on the sea. Matthew John provides an excellent analysis of such a protagonist in his article: ‘Running The Film Against The Reel: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean Figure in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’: ‘Cayrol’s Lazarean figure becomes the very site of this return…It is, thus, in identify[ing] the anonymity, depersonalisation and even physical disfigurement that characterise this figure at play within Resnais’s Muriel that we can hope to offer a re-reading of the film.’ 50 The Lazarean image can therefore extend into possibilities of resistance of which the citational, indexical, and amnesiac are incapable. Lazarean art of now and the future has to embody, literally, what is no longer embodied by survivors and witnesses. The art forms themselves must be Lazarean. It is for this reason that I propose that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is exemplary of such an embodied art, or at least a partial version of such. The song literally arrives at the listener without a narrative of mercy that contextualises and provides complacent comfort. Larry is very much alive and uncontrollable. Yet, he is not completely unrooted – the whole discourse of what ‘Lazarus’ means is still a backdrop. For this reason, the resistance of the Lazarean image in this proposed sense is not just another way of saying, McLuhan-like, that ‘the medium is the message’. This is not so because we still regard the Lazarean as being part of the discourse of biopolitics wherein the concentrationary universe, with its scars and its mark upon humanity, is still being endured. The Lazareanimage-song is, like a ‘whole lot of scraping of chairs’, a disturbance in a very immediate present that generates a presence that demands, at the same time, a witness to something that has happened, a marker or signal of the past that cannot be kept elsewhere.

after haunting

| 187

Conclusion In this chapter I have proposed that Cayrol’s ‘postulate’ of a Lazarean art may be extended into a form of image that is an embodiment of a resistance to this concentrationary world. As the fourth image in my taxonomy of concentrationary images, the Lazarean image forces an encounter with a living moment. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is an example of a song that has some of these Lazarean qualities whilst having the added advantage (for study), of actually being about Lazarus. The fugitive nature of the Lazarean image makes it very difficult to describe; perhaps it is only known when it is encountered. I suggest that there are certain identifiers for which we can look out. The Lazarean image is a witness image; it very much has a quality of life, and not an insecurity about life (i.e. it is not uncanny). It also has some element of affect and emotion. Most of all, in the encounter with it, we will recognize ourselves as also Lazarean.

Benjamin Hannavy Cousen is an artist and academic. He completed his PhD, The Seeping and Creeping of Haunted Memory: Tracing the Concentrationary in Post-War Cinema, in 2011 as part of the AHRC funded ‘Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation’ research project at the University of Leeds. He has a particular interest in the transmission of memory through visual culture, which informs both his practical work as an artist and his theoretical work. He has contributed chapters on film to two volumes in the concentrationary series, ‘Isn’t this where. . .?: Projections on Pink Floyd The Wall: Tracing the concentrationary image’ in Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and ‘Seep and creep: the concentrationary imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)’ in Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2015). Among other publications is an article on memory and painting, ‘Memory, Power, Plane: Where is Guernica?’ (Journal of Romance Studies, 9, 2, 2009).

Notes 1. B. H. Cousen, ‘Isn’t this Where . . .? Projections on Pink Floyd The Wall: Tracing the Concentrationary Image’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 2. B. H. Cousen, ‘Seep and Creep: The Concentrationary Imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 3. Stereogum, ‘New Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”’, www.stereogum.com/7603/ new_nick_cave_the_bad_seeds_dig_lazarus_dig/news/. Last accessed 4 August 2017. 4. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris; Editions de Pavois, 1946); The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947).

188 | benjamin hannavy cousen

5. For reports on these sales, see: www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donaldtrump.html’ and https://jezebel.com/amazon-needs-to-restock-hannah-arendts-the-origins-of-t-179 1754980. Last accessed 20 October 2017. 6. L. Siems, ‘Inside the CIA’s Black Site Torture Room’, The Guardian (9 October 2017), www.theguard ian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/09/cia-torture-black-site-enhanced-interrogation. Last accessed 22 October 2017. 7. D. Trilling, ‘Should We Build a Wall Around North Wales?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 39, No 14 (13 July 2017), 15. In a recent article, Daniel Trilling sums up the moral bankruptcy of the UK’s position: ‘The UK – a pioneer of immigration detention, whose former home secretary, now prime minister, made it her stated intention to create a “hostile environment” for irregular migrants – recently went back on a promise to resettle unaccompanied children from Calais’. What is easily hidden in these words as well as the unknown fate of these children is the fact that immigration detention is an outrageous suspension of the law in the Agambenian sense. As the organisers of Refugee Tales, a walking and writing project that protests against the fact of immigration detention state: ‘arbitrary and indefinite detention is manifestly a breach of due process; that because due process is fundamental to a just society, any such breach is a matter of grave (and general) cultural concern.’ See http:// refugeetales.org/due-process-refugee-tales-talks-2017/. Last accessed July 2017. 8. G. Pollock and M. Silverman, ‘Series Preface – Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2015), xiii–xix. 9. G. Pollock and M. Silverman, ‘Series Preface – Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation’, xix. 10. B. H. Cousen, ‘Isn’t this Where . . .?’, 206–21; B. H. Cousen, ‘Seep and Creep’, 163–85. 11. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989): ‘To regard the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’; G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), 166. See also Pollock and Silverman Concentrationary Memories and Concentrationary Imaginaries. 12. Cousen, ‘Seep and Creep’. 13. Cousen, ‘Seep and Creep’, 166. 14. Jean Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 29. 15. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4. 16. See J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]). 17. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 34. 18. A. Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) 3. 19. T. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, New Left Review 1/87–88 (September–December 1974), 75–89. 20. P. Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. J. Rose (London and New York: Continuum, 2000) 24. 21. It is faintly possible that Arendt already knew of Cayrol’s Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard, (Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1946). Cayrol’s ‘Les Rêves lazaréens’ and ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ had never been translated into English but Arendt had lived in France during the 1930s and was Francophone. The former was first published in the journal Les Temps modernes in 1948, the latter, under the title ‘D’un Romanesque concentrationnaire’, in the journal Esprit in 1949. 22. H. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review, Vol. 15 (1948), 746. 23. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 746. 24. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 746. 25. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps’, 746. 26. P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988 [1986]), 83–84.

after haunting

| 189

27. Rousset’s full statement is as follows: ‘Normal men do not know that everything is possible. Even if the evidence forces their intelligence to admit it, their muscles do not believe it. The concentrationees do know.’ D. Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 168. 28. When using the term ‘Christian’, one almost wants to give up because of the minefield of inferences and hostility it may invoke. Certainly, Cayrol’s use of ‘Lazarean’ is troubling to cultural critics and there is a desire to gloss over the specificities of its use and just to arrive at a simplified sense of an ‘idea of a human being returned from the dead’. This seems to me to be disingenuous. See discussion of ‘Christian’ Lazarus and the Jewish name Eleazar in Griselda Pollock’s Chapter 2 in this volume. 29. The link between haunting and justice being done is made explicit by Jacques Derrida: ‘If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present . . . it is in the name of justice’ (J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xix. 30. S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII (1917–1919) An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Vintage, 2001), 217–257, 246. 31. John 11: 4. 32. S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (London: Penguin Books, 2004 [1849]), 59. 33. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 30. 34. ‘Red River Shore’, lyrics by Bob Dylan, on Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006, Columbia Records, Sony, 2008. This is written around 1997, which is not the time of his ‘born again’ phase (about 1979–84). 35. The validation of using these non-visual ‘images’ as ‘images’ is enunciated by Jacques Rancière: ‘the image is not exclusive to the visible . . . there are images which consist wholly in words.’ J. Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007), 7. 36. ‘Abattoir Blues’, lyrics by Nick Cave, on Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Mute Records, 2004. Reprinted with permission. 37. Nuit et brouillard, dir. Alain Resnais (Argos Films, 1955). 38. J. Rancière, The Future of the Image, 45. Rancière describes it thus: ‘Where all the common terms of measurement that opinions and histories lived on have been abolished in favour of a great chaotic juxtaposition, a great indifferent melange of significations and materialities’, 43. 39. ‘Nature Boy’, lyrics by Nick Cave, on Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Mute Records, 2004. Reprinted with permission. 40. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 231. 41. ‘Moonland’, lyrics by Nick Cave, on, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Mute Records, 2008. Reprinted with permission. 42. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 54. 43. Dr. D Ferrett in personal correspondence with author, 2017. 44. ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’, lyrics by Nick Cave, on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Mute Records, 2008. © Embassy Music Corp OBO Mute Song. Reprinted with permission. 45. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 54. 46. Stereogum, ‘New Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”’, www.stereogum.com/7603/ new_nick_cave_the_bad_seeds_dig_lazarus_dig/news/. Last accessed 4 August 2017. 47. Cayrol, Lazarus Among Us, 54. 48. J.-P. Sartre, L’Imaginaire, trans. Philosophical Library Inc. (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948 [1940]), 19. 49. Sartre, L’Imaginaire, 18–19. 50. M. John, ‘Running the Film against the Reel: Locating Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean Figure in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour’, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories, 83–99, 85.

190 | benjamin hannavy cousen

Bibliography Adorno, T. ‘Commitment’, New Left Review 1/87–88 (September–December 1974), 75–89. Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1995], trans. by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Atwood, M. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage, 1996. Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 2004 [1951]. ———. ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review, vol. 15 (1948), 743–63. Bauman, Z. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity, 1989. Cousen, B. H. ‘Isn’t this Where . . .? Projections on Pink Floyd The Wall: Tracing the Concentrationary Image’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance. London: I.B, Tauris, 2013, 206–21. ———. ‘Seep and Creep: The Concentrationary Imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)’ in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture. London: I.B, Tauris, 2015, 163–85. Gordon, A. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Huyssen, A. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Kierkegaard, S. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. A. Hannay. London: Penguin, 2004 [1849]. Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Levi, P. The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 1988 [1986]. Orwell, G. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin, 2000 [1949]. Pollock, G. and M. Silverman, eds. Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014. ———. Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Rancière, J. The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2007. Rousset, D. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris; Editions de Pavois, 1946; The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Sartre, J.-P. L’Imaginaire [1940], trans. Philosophical Library Inc. London: Methuen, 1972. Shelley, M. The Last Man. Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 1994. Siems, L. ‘Inside the CIA’s Black Site Torture Room’, The Guardian (9 October 2017). Trilling, D. ‘Should We Build a Wall Around North Wales?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 39, No. 14 (13 July 2017). Virilio, P. The Aesthetics of Disappearance [1980], trans. P. Beitchman. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1991. ———. Art and Fear, trans. J. Rose. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Vonnegut, K. Slaughterhouse 5. London: Vintage, 2000 [1969].

CHAPTER 6

Lazarean Sound the autonomy of the auditory from hanns eisler (nuit et brouillard, ) to susan philipsz (night and fog, ) Griselda Pollock

We wanted to avoid making a film where one memorialises the past, mourns its victims and then concludes with a quote ‘never again!’, etc. What we sought was to induce the viewer to action rather than merely stirring his or her emotions. Now, as soon as I say this, everybody will say: ‘Okay, Eisler, of course.’ But this is exactly why I would describe our collaboration as ‘magic’ – that it took place – had to take place and yet, had occurred quite by random. It was like casting dice in a game of chance. —Alain Resnais on Hanns Eisler and the musical score for Nuit et brouillard, 19551 In 1955, French film director Alain Resnais commissioned the (then East) German composer, Hanns Eisler to create the musical score for his film on the concentration camps, Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog). Eisler had not, however, been in Europe during the years of the Third Reich. Unlike the poet Jean Cayrol, a survivor of Mauthausen, who was invited to write the spoken commentary on the film, Eisler had not experienced the concentration camps first hand. So why was it obvious that he would be the composer of choice for Resnais’s film? Why did his collaboration with Resnais perform the ‘magic’ of which the director writes? What would be the musical grammar he could forge to meet the challenge of the image and text elements of Resnais’s shocking film, Nuit et brouillard ? Could the music he composed thus be considered concentrationary? Can I argue that Eisler created Lazarean sound?

192 | griselda pollock

Figure 6.1. Poster for the exhibition Susan Philipsz: Night and Fog at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2016. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

On 30 January 2016 an exhibition titled: Night and Fog opened at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB). It was created by contemporary Scottish artist Susan Philipsz (b.1965). The Austrian town of Bregenz sits on the misty shores of Lake Constance, also known as the Bodensee, situated at the intersection between Austria, Switzerland and Germany. It is mercifully far from the concentration camp hub named Mauthausen-Gusen where French poet and resistance fighter Jean Cayrol was imprisoned as a Nacht und Nebel (literally: Night and Fog) political deportee from 1943 to 1945.2 Philipsz’s Night and Fog formed an installation across four floors of the award-winning, but bleak, monumental concrete structure that is the Kunsthaus Bregenz in which recorded notes scored by Eisler for the individual instruments, bass clarinet, clarinet, trumpet and horn, and violin, each having its own floor, were sounded through spatially distributed speakers of different designs hung on walls or from the ceiling in almost sculptural differing configurations. In addition, on the walls of three floors there were large framed images: blow ups of the score written by Hanns Eisler for the film Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais in 1955 bearing the trace of hurried pencil-written notes and words; large photographs of war damaged musical instruments – horns, trumpets and clarinets; and blown-up reproductions of redacted FBI documents relating to FBI surveillance and the investigation of Hanns Eisler by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Sound was intermedially juxtaposed with archive documents enlarged to function as physical images, witnesses to and correspondents with the discontinuous sound that ‘punctuated’ but also shaped the space the auditor shared with loud speakers, framed texts and the concrete walls. Philipsz brings the political history and radical musical aesthetics of Hanns Eisler back into contemporary cultural discourse through her contemporary artwork.

lazarean sound

| 193

She evokes sonically but does not repeat or rehearse musically what he composed at his own intersection with the political aesthetics of resistance in the visual and textual montage of Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard. Philipsz’s Night and Fog was, however, installed on two sites. It reached out to an additional space of memory – the Jewish cemetery in the nearby Voralberg town of Hohenems, evoking the memory of Jewish history ruptured by the Holocaust, in which neither resting place nor tomb was provided for those murdered by the Third Reich.3 The Lazarean, as I have argued in Chapter 2, is an encounter with death; but it is specifically the bearer of the encounter with the tomb and burial. Perhaps Philipsz thus indirectly reframes what has been a frequent criticism (and misreading) of Resnais’s film – its relative silence about the crime of racial extermination.4 Without intent, but reflecting the overlaying of the two systems – the concentrationary and the genocidally exterminatory – in the contemporary cultural imagination, Philipsz’s artwork thus created a sonic fold between the concentrationary and the exterminatory with which I aim to work by extending Cayrol’s literary concept to propose a Lazarean sound. My purpose is, thus, to situate her practice in relation to the historical analysis of an extended reading of the Lazarean that I explored in Chapter 2 in order to propose a political aesthetics of Lazarean sound in both Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard and Philipsz’s Night and Fog.5 Extending the question of how sound might also be considered within the double register of returning ‘from death to life’ (Cayrol) and agitating the present with sonic presence and sensorial presentness, I want to argue that Susan Philipsz’s artworking retrospectively provides an auditory reading of a troubled past to unsettle the present in the fragmented echoes of that past she made audible, and, to a lesser extent, visible in the installation. That past embraces the historical event of Nazi punishment of political resistance by vanishing resisters into the prolonged torture of disappearance into the camps and into Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) (1940–45). It also involves the French film, titled Nuit et brouillard, made by Alain Resnais as a critique of his own post-war French society’s forgetfulness and persistent ignorance in 1955. I want to ask if sound can also become, on the level of subjectivity and affect, what artist Bracha Ettinger theorizes as an aesthetic-affective ‘transport station’ for the meeting of traumatic pasts with our present?6 To answer these questions, I shall firstly analyse Eisler’s sound track for Resnais’s film to establish the specific character of its musicality. I shall then re-approach it through a creative re-engagement with Eisler’s score in the installation where Susan Philipsz performs a deconstructive, non-musical but still acoustic transformation of elements of Eisler’s sound track. Her artistic gesture offers a retrospective reconsideration of the political and aesthetic moment of Hanns Eisler’s political and creative career as well as his work in 1955 with Alain Resnais on this iconic film about the concentrationary. To highlight the political, ethical and aesthetic stakes involved in both Eisler’s music and Philipsz’s installation evoking both composer and composition, I want to consider two other texts that join this long-distance conversation. One

194 | griselda pollock

is an installation by German conceptual artist Rebecca Horn (b.1944) whose title and location, Concert for Buchenwald (1999), links music composition and performance with the name of an infamous concentration camp in Germany. This camp forms the link to the novel Night, first composed in Yiddish in 1954 and shortened when it was published in French in 1958 by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (1928–2015), a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who was released in May 1945. I focus on a long passage from Wiesel’s Night in which the young Eliezer (the author’s younger avatar – Eliezer being a version of the original Hebrew version of the Greek word Lazarus as I discussed in Chapter 2) hears a violin being played in the middle of a dark night while resting on the edge of dying during a ‘death march’ of Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz to Buchenwald as the Red Army pressed forward towards Auschwitz in January 1945. The literary image of a dying man playing and another listening to the sound of this solitary violin offers, literally, a string to form a sonic bridge to Philipsz’s isolation in her installation Night and Fog of the individuated notes of three wind instruments – clarinet, oboe, flute – so significant in Eisler’s score for Nuit et brouillard and one violin, used so little and so pointedly in the same. The link between these art forms – film, literature, and installation art – is sound rather than music. Thus, the following argument has many facets: artistic, musicological, theoretical, cinematic and literary, which are drawn together so that the autonomy of the auditory – a phrase I borrow from Thomas Trummer (to be explored shortly) – can be teased out from close readings of these different artworks. In his major theoretical elaboration of the field of ‘sound studies’, entitled Sounds: The Ambient Humanities, cultural theorist John Mowitt ponders the absence of an analogue to the concept of the gaze that has helped redefine the field of visual analysis from art through cinema and media. Looming before all other difficulties of the sort entertained above is the terminological and, in the long run, conceptual one. In English we have no convenient analogue to gaze in the auditory or sonic domain.7 The gaze refers to the internal scopic relays within an artwork as much as to the structural interpellation of a viewer sutured into a specular relation to the image. For the analysis of sound/music, Mowitt thus formulates a new concept: the audit. With the audit, we are invited to think of the operation involving an auditory activity that exceeds the typical idea of an audience. The audit implies its own internal auditory processes associated with both producing sound and hearing it, while it also solicits a relation to them from participants activating a cognitive and affective posture of listening to what is at once outside and within. In its noun form, audit traditionally refers to a review of financial records while, as the verb ‘to audit’, it is typically used of students attending a university class without participating fully in its examination and assessments: Pulling these threads together, one arrives not so much at a perception or sensible event but a fold where perception turns back or over on itself,

lazarean sound

| 195

traversing the faculty of hearing with the angle, the posture of listening. It is here that the audit serves as a coherent analogue to the gaze.8 Hearing and listening interlace into a specific condition. The perceptual-subjective fold of the audit is the meeting of the sound emanating from one subject/source and of the sound resonating in the body of an affected, receiving, processing subject. Eisler’s score formed the only continuous sound track in Resnais’s film, as the other sound track – Cayrol’s poetic prose, spoken as voice over by actor Michel Bouquet – often falls silent before the horror of the images. Film historian Sylvie Lindeperg writes of Resnais’s preference for ‘musical continuity [‘partition ininterrompu’] naming Eisler’s score ‘the only continuous voice of the film’, ‘a song that never stops’ citing Resnais: ‘I did not hear silence in the short films I made. One must always hear something’.9 Musically, what Eisler composed for Resnais’s aesthetic of image with sound, therefore, raises its own questions of the political aesthetics of music in film and of sound itself, both of which are taken up in Philipsz’s installation in Bregenz.10

The Music and the Composer for Nuit et brouillard Because he was neither a survivor nor a witness, having been forced into exile from Germany as early as 1933, we need, through biographical details, to situate Hanns Eisler in order to explain the choice of this composer for Resnais’s film before I can analyse the music he produced for this film.

Figure 6.2. Photograph of Hanns Eisler with Bertolt Brecht, March 1950. Bundesarchiv Bild 183-19204-2132, Berlin Sitzung des vorbereitenden Ausschusses der Akademie der Künste der DDR. Photographer Unknown.

196 | griselda pollock

Eisler (1898–1962) was an Austrian born in Leipzig to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother. In accord with the formal aesthetic ambitions of Cayrol and Resnais, his work was musically significant because Eisler had been one of the leading students of the Jewish Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). He was also a proponent of avant-garde twelve-tone music and a politically engaged artist, collaborating with Communist writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), notably on the latter’s landmark film about German workers’ movements and unemployment during the Depression, Kuhle Wampe: To Whom Does the World Belong (dir. Slatan Dudow, Prometheus Film, 1932). As a result of both his leftist sympathies and his radical music, which was immediately banned on Hitler’s accession to power, and being defined as Jewish by the regime’s racial scheme, Eisler was forced into exile in 1933, arriving eventually after wandering rootlessly through several countries in Europe and Mexico, in the United States of America in 1938. He lived first in New York, sustained by some teaching at the New School of Social Research, before moving to Los Angeles in 1941 where he reconnected with fellow exile Bertolt Brecht. There he made a fragile living composing for Hollywood films. Eisler was in fact nominated for an Oscar for his score for Hangmen Also Die! (dir. Fritz Lang, 1943; written by Brecht and another exile, Fritz Lang).11 In the Los Angeles intellectual community of forced migrants, Eisler also conversed with the Marxist critical theorist Theodor Adorno. Together, and enacting a fascinating theoretical-political tension between Brechtian Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory across their uneven contributions to the book, Eisler and Adorno wrote a text analysing film music. Composing for the Films is still the classic reference point for this subject.12 This influential study not only identified and critiqued the ideologically pacifying habits of Hollywood’s use of sentimentalizing and dramatic music in film; it also outlined a thesis for a critical, musical dimension to cinematic composition based on the use of gaps, asymmetry, counterpoint, and dissonance, allowing disconnection between image and sound, narrative and musical affect. Increasingly exposed by his left-wing stance, Eisler was prosecuted as part of the anti-Communist paranoia of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that intensified in the later 1940s and turned its attention specifically to the cultural industry in Hollywood.13 Despite defences from supporters such as Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein, Eisler was deported to Europe on 28 March 1948. On his departure he read out a written statement: I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way . . . My trouble started when I was subpoenaed a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I listened to the talk and the ques-

lazarean sound

| 197

tions of these men and I saw their faces. As an old antifascist it became plain to me that these men represent fascism in its most direct form. That they represent the ignorance and barbarism which could lead to a new war. I was against them. There is a limit to the patience of an artist. I saw these evil men trying to take over the affairs of this great country at a time really complicated and indeed dangerous for all of us. And I had to stand up against these men, regardless of consequences. A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. And I had to defend music.14 Eisler initially settled in Austria before moving to East Germany where he composed the new communist state’s national anthem. Witnessing the increasingly brutal totalitarianism of its Stalinist regime, Eisler became profoundly depressed. Following a recommendation to Resnais by writer and filmmaker Chris Marker (1921–2012), Eisler was eventually tracked down in East Germany and contacted on 15 October 1955 by Resnais and Argos Films. He was invited to Paris to undertake the composition of a musical score for the film Nuit et brouillard that Eisler then composed between 30 November and 15 December and recorded finally on 24 December 1955.15 After considerable revision and editing, Jean Cayrol had provided a fractured and laconic voiceover that was threaded across Resnais’s revolutionary combination of contemporary scenes of Auschwitz-Birkenau shot in colour with archival film and photography in black and white that the filmmaker had assembled in a still powerfully shocking montage. Cinematically realizing Cayrol’s propositions for a Lazarean or concentrationary art, Resnais’s film sought to create the effect of perpetual un-ease and to incite anxious vigilance in a world still menaced by what Cayrol named in the final passage of the film as the undead concentrationary monster. In radical contrast to Cayrol’s attenuated prose poem intermittently voiced over the images, Eisler was asked to compose a sonic baseline in constant relay with the image track. To meet this demand, Eisler created a gravely ironic counterpointing of musical mood to the images to circumvent the Hollywood habit of prescribing emotional response through making music either compatible with the image or comforting before it. Drawing on several other French and German authors in her study of Eisler’s musical contribution to the film, film historian Sylvie Lindeperg thus identifies four musical themes that structure the musical politics of Eisler’s composition. 1. Solo instruments such as the flute and clarinet dominate in the opening images. These also come back over the horrifying post-liberation scenes of British army burying the corpses found at Bergen-Belsen. Eisler’s use of each instrument’s distinctive voice serves to individualize the mass of bodies in contrast to the imposed anonymity and effaced humanity of those either imprisoned or murdered as a species;

198 | griselda pollock

2. For scenes of the round ups and deportations, brass and trumpets are used, sometimes tipped into affectivity by subtle introduction of the piano and strings; 3. No emotionality is allowed for images of the executioners – Nazis and the SS – so musical dissonance and pizzicato with some percussion prevail when they are on screen. This harsh musical device is used also for the three chronological markers, 1933, 1942, 1945; 4. A melodic but mournful funeral music plays over the opening credits, setting in place a musical affect before any images. This theme returns, but in a minor key, during the scene in which the camera tracks along the walls and over the ceiling of the Madjanek gas chamber. It is played in the concluding section as a travelling shot moves over the abandoned Auschwitz site and rests under the ruined crematoria of Birkenau. This was the only musical element borrowed from an earlier work by Eisler.16 With the strategic repeat of the opening string-orchestral theme, Eisler musically joins the imageless pre-credit sequence with the finale, when, moving over the ruins of the crematoria, the film issues its warning of the still infectious ‘concentrationary plague’, its lackeys and murderers amongst us still. Cayrol’s words ask ‘us’ not to turn a deaf ear to an endless cry – the French phrase is critical: ‘qu’on crie sans fin’ – and the lyrical sound of the violins fades into thirteen insistent beats of a kettledrum. Writing of the political aesthetics of Eisler’s composition, Thomas Trummer argues: Eisler’s music is economical, not only in the case of the bass clarinet. He worked against dramatization. A musical language that aroused fear would only have enhanced the horror. Pathos yellows – it is a heroic music, and it is tiring. Instead, in a dialectical movement Eisler leads the music in a conciliatory direction, oblique to the images.17 Identifying not only the music’s singular dramaturgy, Trummer thus insists on the ‘autonomy of the auditory’ that is created by Eisler: The more intense the visual agitation gets, the more soothing his composition. Solo parts take over delicate threads of melody: the flute in leaps of seconds or the first violin, which recalls both the Jewish song tradition and the meagre orchestras in the camps. True to the text he wrote with Adorno, Eisler strives for autonomy for the auditory; the music makes its own laws – even in film music, where it corresponds to the narrative but does not subjugate itself to it. Eisler cuts the rage back. He softens the martial aspects but does not, in doing so, lessen the grief over what occurred.18 (my emphasis) Trummer is drawing on Eisler’s statements in Composing for the Films about autonomous music (an Adornian code word for post-Schoenberg avant-garde music) and autonomy for music from serving the image, where in a section on music and mon-

lazarean sound

| 199

tage, Eisler writes about the relation between a representational medium and the nonrepresentational, autonomous music. However, the unity of the two media is achieved indirectly; it does not consist in the identity between any elements, be it that between tone and colour or that of the ‘rhythms’ as a whole. The meaning or function of the elements is intermediary; they never coincide per se. If the concept of montage, so emphatically advocated by Eisenstein, has any justification, it is to be found in the relation between the picture and the music. From an aesthetic point of view, this relation is not one of similarity, but, as a rule, one of question and answer, affirmation and negation, appearance and essence . . . Music, however well defined in terms of its own structure, is never sharply defined with regard to any object outside itself to which it is related by imitation or expression.19 Thus Trummer can conclude: For Nuit et brouillard he worked with a different sound language . . . thinned out, almost at the edge of a tonality, yet sympathetic to the tonal. . . . It is the images that disturb, not the music.20 (my emphasis) This interpretation makes clear that Eisler avoided what, in an essay written in 1962 on the paradox of the impossibility of and the necessity for art ‘after Auschwitz’, Adorno criticized in the tormented cantata The Survivor of Warsaw (1948) by Eisler’s teacher Arnold Schoenberg, in which the composer had powerfully deployed his twelve-tone system to create a work that musically disturbed the spoken text about the final days of the Warsaw ghetto. Yet, Adorno argued, Schoenberg had betrayed himself musically in the concluding passages because he appeared to offer to his post-war listeners the undeserved solace provided by the moving passage in which a chorus of those about to die declare continuing fidelity to their Jewish faith. Adorno concluded that, by making ‘an unthinkable fate appear to have some meaning, it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed’.21 Thus the ethical-political posture of the music must resist any consolation of the audience without betraying the pathos of the victims of fascist violence.

A Lazarean Reading of Night One episode recounted in Elie Wiesel’s Night (1954–58) takes place during a death march. I introduce it to bridge the moment of its writing in the mid-1950s, a counterpoint to Jean Cayrol’s poetics, and my discussion of Susan Philipsz’s installation Night and Fog in 2016 that tied together two sites by means of a string of sound. Wiesel’s tale concerns a violin, a player, a listener, and a freighted piece of music.22 Towards the end of Night comes this story. Eliezer, still a boy, and his father survived Auschwitz III-Monowitz until January 1945. The Red Army is advancing

200 | griselda pollock

through Poland and is almost at the gates of Auschwitz. A column of emaciated, overworked and starving slave labourers is on a forced march in freezing conditions from the factory at Auschwitz-Buna to the satellite camp Gleiwitz (80 km; 50 miles) before being put on a train to be transported to the German concentration camp of Buchenwald outside Weimar. They are forced to run, in their emaciated, exhausted state for days on end. At the end of one fearful day of forced movement in biting cold, the prisoners collapse in a barracks on heaps of straw and on each other in obliviating exhaustion. Eliezer hears a voice emerging faintly from deep in the pile of bodies beneath him, calling for mercy to be allowed to breathe. He recognizes the voice of a young Polish Jewish lad, Juliek, a musician, who, drowning in the sea of dying men, is, perplexingly, desperately concerned that his violin will be damaged in the crush of almost senseless bodies. He has carried it with him on their two-day march. Eliezer himself is being suffocated by the heap of bodies: My whole desire to live became concentrated in my nails. I scratched, I fought for a breath of air. I tore at decaying flesh that did not respond. I could not free myself of that mass weighing down my chest. Who knows? Was I struggling with the dead man? I shall never know. All I can say is that I prevailed. I succeeded in digging a hole in that wall of dead and dying people, a small hole through which I could drink a little air. 23 Wiesel’s oceanic imagery of immersion translates the tumble of men at the very limits of their physical strength, hovering on the slimmest of thresholds between sleep as longed-for rest and recovery and sleep as the threshold of a slide into death, using the metaphors of water and air: drowning, suffocation and drinking air. It is for that breath of air he fights with a physical tenacity that bypasses his own ability to discern the nature of that with which he must struggle. When he can breathe, Eliezer uses the air to call out – to his father – and to use his voice in call and response in order to be reassured not only that his father still lives, but that he, Eliezer, is still connected to the one living human being who knows him and links him to the world of humanizing others distinct from the mass of bodies in undecidable states between dying, deadness, and sleep. As his father replies he is trying to sleep, the boy wonders if sleep is too dangerous to risk for fear that death could steal them at a time of lowered vigilance, coming like a thief when they are most defenceless and longing for any relief from the torture they have just endured running in the snow. FATHER, ARE YOU THERE? I asked as soon as I was able to utter a word. I knew that he could not be far from me. ‘Yes’. A voice replied from far away, as if from another world. ‘I am trying to sleep.’ He was trying to sleep. Could one fall asleep here? Wasn’t it dangerous to lower one’s guard, even for a moment, when death could strike at any time?

lazarean sound

| 201

Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a violin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination? It had to be Juliek. He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence. ... The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek’s soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again. I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men. I do not know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse. 24 It is in this tenebrous state of suspended time that sound is invoked, and a specific sound that is not made with the breath but with a bow of hairs on taut strings culling sound from the body of a wooden instrument that produces music with the quality of a wordless, affect-laden human voice. He asks: ‘Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave?’ He specifies that the madman was playing, not only music, but a concerto. Not any concerto, but a fragment of the only Beethoven violin concerto (D major, Op. 61, 1806). This is not a piece of Klezmer violin music. This is not a folk tune. This is not a piece of liturgical music. It is a work from the classical repertoire, a concerto, and moreover a concerto by a German composer, whose music, by virtue of that Germanness under the terms of Aryan segregation during the Third Reich, was forbidden to Jewish musicians.25 What is more striking, however, is that the devout, religiously Chasidic, rabbinical student and teenager, Eliezer from Sighet, recognized the piece as the Beethoven concerto.26 Then follows the description of being enveloped in both darkness and sound. Darkness suspends sight and awareness of space. The only sense that Eliezer experiences at this point is acoustic, which is intensely but diffusedly corporeal. For what Eliezer ‘hears’ in the barracks in Gleiwitz is not the music (although it is, of course, culturally understood as music because it is identified as the Beethoven violin concerto). What he is listening to is the player and the playing. ‘His whole being was gliding over the strings.’ The listening/hearing subject feels the playing subject as a being of ‘unfulfilled hopes’, suspended in a moment of time he knows he

202 | griselda pollock

will not live out. The yearnings in time that is no longer his to live are qualified using the exterminatory metaphor that inflects this scene with its specific Jewish memory: fire. As a Jewish concentrationee, Juliek is playing his charred past (his past and those who lived it with him having been burnt). His extinguished future (already suffocated) evokes both the current gasping for breath and breathing poisoned air in the gas chambers. This playing, gerundive and present tense, however, already performs for the listener that ‘extinguished future’. It has already been suffocated and silenced. Eliezer hears and knows it in his hearing. He then falls asleep to the ‘sound of a concert given before an audience of dead and dying’. This is an important phrasing. Dead and dying lie together, indistinguishable, in some ways ‘listening’ too. Yet both form a unified audience of non-conscious listeners, two conditions melding into one in relation to the musician playing Beethoven as the soundscape of his charred past and extinguished future, animated, however, by unfulfilled (or lost) hopes (‘ses espoirs perdus’ in the French) and a ‘whole being’ poured into the instrument’s solitary, unique and wordless musical voice. When Eliezer reawakens, the text positions him facing the dead Juliek, or rather, Juliek, now dead, is facing him (en face de moi, recroquevillé sur lui-meˆme, mort). Can a dead man have a face, or be face in the later sense we inherit from the Jewish Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s attempt to reclaim a human ethics in the aftermath of this horror?27 Beside him, Eliezer sees, and Wiesel makes his reader imagine, the affecting ‘little corpse’, trampled, (piétiné, écrasé, petit cadavre insolite et bouleversant) that was the instrument of both Juliek’s farewell concert to the unconscious others, and his elegy to his own unlived life, on which he expended his final, briefly revived life-force in re-entering a destroyed world through sonic art that remains impressed on, and is carried beyond that moment by means of, Wiesel’s auditory memory. In this short passage, language evokes a vivid physicality that performs what I dare to claim for the text of a Jewish survivor, Elie Wiesel, as the Lazarean. This refers to the condition of the writing subject, Wiesel, who has lived through this event. It also describes the aesthetic effect of an art marked by his having not merely inhabited but having been immersed sensorially as well as morally in an other world where living and dying mingle in dreadful proximity. That other world is, however, now inseparable from the being of the writer as the condition of a new kind of ‘non-living’ that has engendered a ‘death-writing’, a writing that goes beyond the momentary state of suspension between living and dying in which Juliek temporarily performed. It is a sensorial and spiritual immersion in an endless tomb-world. Yet the memory that is carried from that place is not only a musical sound, but also the evocation of the player, culling from his precious instrument its voice by performing for himself some sounds from the violin solo in Beethoven’s solitary violin concerto, composed in 1806, then forgotten and only revived by Felix Mendelssohn in 1844 to be played by a thirteen-year-old Hungarian Jewish violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), a tiny

lazarean sound

| 203

historical fact that travels in time to the Hungarian Jewish teenager listening in the barracks at Gleiwitz on the way to Buchenwald.

The Journey to Night and Fog Susan Philipsz’s artistic medium is not music, like Eisler, but sound, which she often situates in culturally or politically freighted architectural space.28 In her early works, Philipsz moved through urban and domestic spaces and deployed her own, untrained singing voice within them. In several works relevant to this chapter, the artist has worked with both individual instruments and isolated notes. Her artistic journey to this practice and the installation at Bregenz, however, passed through one specifically relevant, historical and artistic conjunction: namely her inclusion the quinquennial exhibition titled DOCUMENTA in 2012. Susan Philipsz was invited to participate in the thirteenth edition, dOCUMENTA (13), in 2012 (this is the graphic style chosen for this manifestation). Today the most influential repeating international exhibition of contemporary art, DOCUMENTA first opened in 1955, the same year as Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard was made but before it was shown in Germany in 1956. The exhibition in 1955 took place in the Hessian city of Kassel strategically situated on the then newly formed border between a divided Germany. DOCUMENTA was first instituted as a one-off exhibition at the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of World War II in 1945, when a modernist German artist and designer Arnold Bode (1900–77) proposed an art exhibition to take place in the still semi-ruined city (Kassel had been destructively bombed in 1941 by the Allies because it was the strategic location of the production of tanks for the German Wehrmacht). Bode intended a single gesture of reconnection with a temporarily broken history of Modern European art and to blot out the period of Third Reich that had isolated Germany from modern art. Bode’s primary aim was to reconnect a post-war German public, long alienated by Hitler’s anti-modern fascist aesthetics, with a European modernism that had all been denounced by the Third Reich as degenerate, Bolshevik and Jewish.29 Still a product of pre-war modernist aesthetics, Bode privileged abstraction (the most autonomous visual art as it were) as the aesthetic counterpoint to fascism. Abstraction represented for Bode an international artistic language transcending all political and ideological differences, while, in effect, articulating a specific post-war ideology of a universalist artistic progression towards this ultimate condition for art. Thus, to counter the aestheticization of politics and the racialization of aesthetics enacted by the Third Reich, Bode proposed, in an Adornian gesture but without the latter’s Marxism, a re-engagement with art in its most extreme formal disassociation from any aspect of the concrete social or political world while presenting this transcendence as itself a supreme political gesture of liberation from both political and aesthetic fascism.30

204 | griselda pollock

Italian-American writer and creator of exhibitions, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who ‘drafted’ (her own term) rather than curated or directed dOCUMENTA (13), was profoundly aware of the danger of forgetting. She equally insisted on the corresponding need to challenge Bode’s and others’ false and historical narrative of smooth reconnection. Art is needed to agitate the present with dialectically Adornian awareness of the continuing meaning of both Holocaust and concentrationary memory and their pertinence as framework through which to recognize contemporary crises, and the current condition of both trauma and forgetfulness.31 Christov-Bakargiev placed these concerns, however, in the context of the specific historical associations of this city, Kassel, and this specific, reunited country, Germany, in terms of world history in 2008–2012 (the planning period for this exhibition) with its enlarged sense of multiple sites of dictatorship, terror, trauma, war as well as resistance and hope.32 She also wanted to reveal how both Holocaust and concentrationary memory were always already part of DOCUMENTA’s foundation in 1955 as much as the subsequent and notably the recent incarnations of the now quinquennial exhibition. In their preparation for making new works for her dOCUMENTA (13), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev encouraged all the invited artists to engage with both the overall history of the foundation of DOCUMENTA and the history of Kassel between 1933–1955. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev thus reinterpreted Bode’s originating project to expose it as a symptom of a post-war psycho-political condition she coded as this trio: ‘trauma, collapse and recovery’, a condition that, she also argued, characterized the traumatized world ca. 2012, following the world financial crash in 2008, the continuing agonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, the still hopeful uprisings named the Arab Spring (2010–11), the ever-increasing threat of climate change and planetary disaster, and the intimations of new multi-species politics of life. Bode’s aim had been to ‘return’ an exiled modern art to Germany and to return Germany to the mainstream history of modern art. Yet, according to Christov-Bakargiev, his gesture would forever carry the trace of the violence of cultural extinction and, as importantly, the stink of the destruction of life enacted also by the Third Reich that she implies must not be effaced in universalist cultural gesturing and papering over the rupture that Adorno argued redefined our life and death in the era ‘after Auschwitz’.33 Instead, art now needed to imagine, both formally and conceptually, a different relation to the entanglement of historical legacies of catastrophe with present dangers.34 In addition to taking into account contemporary situations and future challenges worldwide, Christov-Bakargiev, therefore, encouraged all the artists, as part of their preparations for creating new works for the exhibition, to visit the one concentration camp near Kassel at Breitenau that had begun as a Benedictine Abbey. It had been converted in the nineteenth century to a prison, and, post-war, became a reform school for girls. The concentration camp had opened as early as 1933 to be closed down in 1934. It was reactivated as a forced labour camp in 1940, coming to an end with the secret massacre of the surviving inmates by the SS at the close of the war.35 Kassel had also had a Jewish population recorded in the city since 1293. By 1933,

lazarean sound

| 205

2,301 Jewish residents were recorded forming 1.13 percent of the city’s population. Under the Third Reich, 300 Jewish men, women and children were sent to Buchenwald; 560 escaped by emigration; 470 were deported to their deaths in Riga in 1941, 99 to Majdanek and 323 to Terezin in 1942. This framework tipped Philipsz’s work for this exhibition into an intersection with both ‘concentrationary’ and Holocaust memory work but by means of her medium, the sonic, the acoustic and the musical. For her contribution to dOCUMENTA (13), Philipsz created a sound work that was installed at the end of a platform of the partially disused Hauptbahnhof (Main Station) of Kassel (Figure 6.3). The work was an evocation of a musical composition Study for Strings, composed in 1943 by the Czech Jewish composer Pavel Haas (1899–1944) while he was imprisoned in the ghetto of Terezin, in what is now the Czech Republic. While using the same title, Study for Strings, Philipsz’s work was, however, immaterial save for the speakers suspended amidst the other lines and railway technologies. Philipsz thus refused representation or even evocative repetition. In the heavily charged space of this German city’s railway platform, the artist distributed her reconfigured sonic traces of Haas’s last orchestral composition. Built as a garrison town in the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (hence its German name is Theresienstadt), parts of Terezin were used by the Nazis as a ghetto concentration camp for Czech Jewry and for notable European Jews too prominent to be disappeared without a trace. Looking like a town with its own ‘government’ and economy, Terezin, however, offered only horrendous, barely endurable conditions: extreme lack of nourishment, congestion of bodies, no privacy, lice and flea-born infestations, infections from unspeakable sanitary conditions, and continual physical and psychological abuse through excessive labour, and the regular threat of ‘transports’ for those no longer deemed useful. 45,000 people were crammed into spaces designed for 10,000 inhabitants with radically insufficient nutrition. There were regular transports of its ailing inmates to Auschwitz or when space was needed and the aged were ‘cleared out’. Yet in Terezin, the prisoners – so many were artists, writers, composers and cultural figures – sustained a remarkable cultural life of resistance through music and theatre – sometimes under compulsion from their jailers.36 When 456 Danish Jews were sent to Terezin, Christian X, King of Denmark asked to see the conditions of a place that had been used in Nazi propaganda as a supposed example of Nazi generosity in ‘giving’ the Jewish people ‘their own town’. To handle the coming inspection by Danish civil servants and the Danish Red Cross, a fabrication of a normal town was rapidly created with artists being mobilised to create façades of shopfronts and other virtual amenities, like the stage flats that form a town created on a Hollywood back lot. This illusory town presented shops full of images of food and other facilities never provided to the starving, overworked and rapidly dying ghetto inmates. Following the success of this deception of the Red Cross inspectors, one of the most cynical projects of the Nazi regime took shape. Hitler commissioned a propa-

206 | griselda pollock

ganda film in 1944 about Jewish ‘life’ in Terezin in order falsely to demonstrate to the outside world the apparently idyllic conditions in which the Jewish inmates were living in this gift paradise, complete with food and rich cultural entertainments. The film’s full title was Theresienstadt: ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem Jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: a documentary film about the Jewish settlement), also known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City). All those involved forcibly in making this film were murdered on its completion. The same fate was inflicted on members of the Terezin prisoners’ orchestra and on the composer Pawel Haas himself, gassed in Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 17 October 1944. Karel Ancerl, the conductor of the first performance of Study for Strings that took place in Terezin as part of this cultural resistance seeking to preserve the prison population’s human identity amidst systematic dehumanization, survived and was later able to reconstruct the score of Haas’s composition. In such a context, the notes from Haas’s hideously silenced music fracturing the silence of the partially disused railway station in Kassel could not just be played again in any simple gesture of return. That might sound like resurrection. Formally rather than narratively, Susan Philipsz’s work would have to instigate an anxious memory for the present of the conditions of the first and only performance of Study for Strings and of the unbearable silencing of the composer through his murder in Auschwitz in 1944. What Susan Philipsz did was to deconstruct the orchestral score and isolate, as a singular voice and implied body, the string elements of the viola and the cello. This involved, moreover, isolating each note assigned to each instrument by playing each of them through a range of speakers, themselves divided in space, observing the silences when they did not play. Each note on each instrument was separately recorded and was then played through strategically placed conical loudspeakers positioned at the end of a railway platform (Figure 6.3). Musical sound and location worked together not only in the contemporary environment in Germany. The work also activated the political freight and figurative weight of railway platforms and lines. Railways had, by this date, become the visual icon of the Shoah/Holocaust as a result of the manner in which film maker Claude Lanzmann had repeatedly inserted long takes of moving trains as a recurring punctuation point during his nine-hour film Shoah (1974–1985).37 The effect of Philipsz’s procedure is to allow each note and each instrument to function as a solitary voice while rendering audible the pauses or silences where the other notes or instruments – or players – might have once been. In creating an audible gap, a haunting memory of an incomplete orchestra is implied. Beyond representation, the work thus sonically broadcasts the unknown sequencing of solitary sound and silence to which the auditors attend, straining for the next sound, becoming part of a ruptured whole without any rhythm to the sound and the silence. It is at the level of pensive reflection, while listening, on the part of those who pause, and wait for sound, that a suggestion of those human bodies that once played these notes

lazarean sound

| 207

Figure 6.3. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Study for Strings, installed at the end of the platforms of the Hauptbahnhof Kassel as her commission for dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, 2012. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

under duress as part of a contrived falsehood might be imagined. Yet the fragmented composition as a whole marks the absence of one person, the creative artist and composer named Pawel Haas. The sonic dimension, in a sense, declines metaphor yet also evades recuperative metonymy. The strings by which these sounds, this place, a history, come together is the listener. What John Mowitt has termed the audit is where meaning is being generated. In related and subsequent projects, Philipsz took up this engagement not only with sound as a transport of memory but with the aesthetic translation of absence through an artwork that incites the audit in the auditor. One such project involved her collection of musical instruments damaged and compromised in the course of war, flight, exile or mass murder. In 2015, as part of the First World War centenary commemorations, Philipsz installed her work War Damaged Musical Instruments in the Duveen Gallery of the Tate Britain, in London (see Figure 6.7). She had collected British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in the last 200 years in the course of conflict, reminding us of both the musicians involved in the armed forces as buglers and trumpeters, and of the musicians who are called up as soldiers, often taking their own instruments with them to war. For this installation, working with dedicated musicians, Philipsz recorded each injured instrument as contemporary musicians tried to coax out of these battered sound-producing bodies the isolated, single notes of the military bugle call: The Last Post, which was historically played on the battlefield to indicate to lost or wounded soldiers that it was safe to return to

208 | griselda pollock

base. It is also better known as the tune that is played at military funerals, on Remembrance Day ceremonies and indeed every evening at 19.00 hours since 11 November 1918 at the Menin Gate in the city of Ypres in Belgium, the almost demolished city that lies beneath the ridge of Passchendaele, the site of one of the most deadly battles of the so-called Great War between July and November 1917. Philipsz’s methodology here anticipated her strategy of taking apart the musical whole with all its affective and historical resonance – its concertedness – in order to focus on the strangulated voice of each damaged instrument that can no longer be musically animated by the breath of the living player.38 Breath, like sound, is both inside and outside the body, inhaled for us to live, expelled to make sound either via the voice or with the aid of an instrument. Human breathing is necessary for certain instruments to ‘speak’. The issuing sound evokes the living body that struggles to enliven the damaged relic of the missing, wounded, dead, disappeared musician to whom this instrument once belonged. Art historian Linda Schädler wrote of the Tate installation: Each of them represents a tragic story, sometimes forgotten over time, sometimes still remembered. It is known to this day, for example, that one of the bugles Philipsz came across was recovered beside the body of a fourteen-year-old drummer after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, or that several instruments were found after clearing out a civilian bunker in Berlin at the end of Second World War. All these instruments bear traces of damage: bullet holes, dents or missing parts. Philipsz asked musicians to try carefully to play these instruments. Sometimes it worked, but more often than not it was virtually impossible to coax tones out of them (hence the hesitant and faltering quality of the recorded sound). Sometimes, there is no sound at all, and the breath of the musicians is the only thing that can be heard. The human is present through the breath exhaled through the instruments. For the artist, it is not about composing in the strict sense of the word. Rather, she is interested in how the sounds can still be produced with damaged instruments, and how they evoke historical narratives.39 The work of Susan Philipsz is rightly named sound sculpture because of the strategic and physical positioning of the speakers in space. These sound-reproducing technologies function in such space as visible objects. They emit sound from a now invisible source, creating what composer Pierre Schaefer and later film theorist Michel Chion, have theorised as acousmatic sound: a sound that is heard without its origin being seen, a proposition more complexly elaborated in recent scholarship.40 Thus, visually and acoustically, the speakers distribute technologically an invisibly generated, acousmatic sound that orchestrates the space, redefining the spaces within the architecture of the environment in which the auditors move in relation to their attentiveness to the invisible distribution of sounds. Via their ‘audit’, the visitors to the gallery become auditors to a sound event that in reality exists for them only as it reverberates within each of their bodies. The speakers thus reconfigure the exhibition arena by transmit-

lazarean sound

| 209

ting an acoustic impact into the body of the auditor, wandering and thus drawing lines in space between the points in space from which emanate technologically distributed and invisible but space-shaping and subjectively experienced sound. Philipsz thus works between hearing and listening, between a certain perceptual, sensible dimension of sound and the attentive and affective dimensions of our response to sound when, being heard, it has already become part of our own sensorial and affected experience while inciting thoughtfulness. Never being outside the affect, but, in the ‘perceptual fold of hearing and listening’ as Mowitt defines it, the auditor is caught in a certain kind of relay between the projection of sound, the reception of sound, and becoming the subjective site of sound where an affect may emerge, a memory be activated, an evoked event endowed with historical or political meaning. In a work from 2014 sited in Hamburg, Part File Score, Philipsz had begun to explore materials from and about the case of the politically persecuted and twice-exiled German musician Hanns Eisler (1898–1962).41 His early compositions for films include Prelude of a Passacaglia (1926), written for the abstract film by Walter Ruttmann, Lichtspiel: Opus III (1924), and for Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain (1941), written for Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929) and Septet No. 2 (1947), written for but never included in Charlie Chaplin’s film The Circus (1948). Philipsz used these in a 40-minute looped work staged across 24 loudspeakers, installed in the otherwise empty hall of the iconic Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (long since turned into an art space). The installation also included 12 digital print and silkscreen works that are enlargements of FBI documents relating to the surveillance and prosecution of Eisler during the late 1940s as part of the anti-Communist paranoia of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and his deportation from the United States.42 These documents, complete with censoring blackouts, are superimposed on blow-ups of Eisler’s autograph musical scores. Eisler had evolved Schoenberg’s innovation of the twelve-tone scale in radically new and political directions: Where Schoenberg’s symphonies accosted the audience with the cacophony of the industrial age, Eisler’s employment of the 12-tone method in film, theater, and radio drama sublimated its whip of alienation into the everyday. Philipsz takes the move one step further. She wrests the listener from his velvet-clad chair on the mezzanine or reclined La-Z-Boy at home, throwing him into the orchestra pit: she implicates him in the deed. However, despite its anti-hierarchical efforts, agency remains at arm’s length, visible but not actionable.43

Befogged on the Bodensee So let me now return to the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB) titled Night and Fog (Figure 6.1). Philipsz has stated that it was initially the atmospheric conditions of the mist arising from the Bodensee on which Bregenz sits that prompted an

210 | griselda pollock

association with fog. Yet her sensorial response, registered in photographs of her own breath on the window as she looks out to a foggy scene, placed strategically in her installation and titled Vernebelt: Befogged crosses from a meteorological, environmental dimension of the actual city to connect with her work on the themes of mourning and memory and historical absence (Figure 6.4). Philipsz conceived for that museum a work based on isolating the wind elements of Eisler’s musical score for the soundtrack of Resnais’s film Night and Fog, stating ‘I would like to explore disappearance, obscurity, absence, merging the atmospherics of the site with a deeper historical perspective’.44 Only towards the end of her planning did she decide to include the violin. How can a film soundtrack be translated into an installation without the film, and what would its deconstructed recorded replay note by note be and do in an art museum? This raises my question. Perhaps unknowingly but nonetheless effectively, is Philipsz’s installation sonically performing a contemporary form of the Lazarean because of its indeterminate and incomplete form of return/replay? The KUB is a stark modernist building designed by Peter Zumthor on four levels linked by a steep central staircase (Figure 6.4). It produces a specific quality of light and reflection but is not really hospitable to sound works. Philipsz turned a grey cube space built for viewing into an auditory space by locating separated notes from one instrument on each floor of the structure. She isolated one instrument per floor and recorded each of its notes separately (Figure 6.5). These were then distributed over twelve speakers positioned sculpturally in each space. If the horizontal line of each instrument’s music was deconstructed for each floor, Philipsz also used the floors in combination so that the whole formed, however disconnectedly, the vertical dimension of an orchestral score. Such a score includes individual musical lines for each instrument, laid out in parallel so as to create an overall sound through the combination of the lines for many instruments, already divided into types: brass, wind, string, percussion, keyboard. Here is the structure of the work in the installation that indicates the instruments but also the accompanying visual elements. Ground Floor: Bass Clarinet, 12 speakers, hung on the wall. First Floor: Clarinet, 12 speakers, suspended from the ceiling; framed inkjet digital prints on canvas 192 x 144 cm of pages of the musical score of Nuit et brouillard. In the stairwells of the lower floors are photographs of her own breath on a glass plate; these photographs are collectively titled VERNEBELT befogged. Second Floor: Trumpet and Horn, 12 speakers suspended from the ceiling, C type prints of war damaged instruments salvaged from Berlin 1945. Third Floor: Violin, 12 speakers suspended from the ceiling, Digital ink and screen print on canvas 185 x 145, FBI documents on Hanns Eisler. Remotely at the Jewish Cemetery at Hohenems: Flute 12 speakers in the trees around the wall.

lazarean sound

| 211

Figure 6.4. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Vernebelt IV (Befogged IV). Artist’s breath on glass, installed in the stairwell at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photographic print on Alu-Dibond behind glass, 50 × 33 cm. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

Figure 6.5. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Musical instrument plan for four storeys of Kunsthaus Bregenz. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

212 | griselda pollock

lazarean sound

| 213

The otherwise empty, cold and severe architectural interior was visually marked mainly by the black bodies of speakers, standing head height along the walls or hovering just above the heads of the auditor-visitor (Figure 6.6). Their shape is abstract but formally each might suggest a featureless head. They function as both the apparatus and image of sound. Following this logic of installed speakers, the second floor took on the military-associated brass instruments, trumpets and horns but they were visually echoed by images on the wall of their metal corpses – trampled, killed instruments relating to the violence of war. The third floor brought back the instrument where sound resonates in its little body, as its strings are plucked by fingers (pizzicato) or with a bow to call out its voice: the violin. Initially, the artist had not intended to include it. By means of the central staircase, which connected the floors and served as the resonance chamber for the body of sound, an auditor/visitor might experience some synchronization of the disparate notes as they moved through the building. Looking at photographs of damaged instruments on the second floor, we might be tempted to ask if the artist had literalized the image of the dead violin we find in Wiesel’s Night. I think not. Recall that in the Tate installation of this work where the artist had taken the instrument from its broken past to make it present through the exercise of musicians attempting to play such instruments by passing their breath through the tortured metal, the effect was to create a concert of the instruments’ own disability. Furthermore, I do not think the instruments become metonymies of the dead. These portraits of the

Figure 6.6. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Installation view of the ground floor (bass clarinet). Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

214 | griselda pollock

Figure 6.7. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. War Damaged Instruments, 2015, framed C-type prints, photographed in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin, salvaged from the Alte Münze Berlin, 1945, installed on the second floor (trumpet). Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

damaged instruments create instead an image for both inflicted violence and the missing-ness of a musician. There is also meaning in the connections created in the building itself that bring to the surface what might be considered specific to the concentrationary music of Eisler’s score (Figure 6.8). Philipsz selected only four separate elements of Eisler’s composition and worked almost exclusively with the wind instruments – bass clarinet, clarinet and flute – and brass, recording each note of each instrument separately in order to make audible the silences when each instrument is not at work. The powerful effect of this procedure was to install, at the same time as the unique notes, the missing elements of the other instruments and thus to produce silence as indexical of what is missing by dialectical contradiction to the sheer physical bodily presence of the breath by which the sounds of wind and brass instruments are produced. What is, then, the effect in the KUB installation of hearing Eisler’s sounds deconstructed into each, solitary physical act of blowing and stopping, beating or bowing, undertaken by the performers working with each instrument in ways that refuse the orchestral whole and radically undo the affectivity of notes combining to create music? What is the point of making us listen deeply to sound and to the silence not permitted by Resnais to Eisler, making us pause and wait for another orphaned note whose existence indexes the act of its creation by an otherwise invisible human body?

lazarean sound

| 215

Figure 6.8. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. Installation view of the first floor (clarinet) with Eisler’s title pages for his handwritten score for parts 1–3 of Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1955), inkjet digital print on canvas, 185 × 145 cm. Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

These questions point us in two directions. We are taken towards the issue of the difference between using the instruments as stand-ins for the missing – a metonymy – and creating a sound that functions indexically in the present (even if recorded) such that any evocation of their one-time players and their disappearance/destruction/ absence is subdued so as not to become soothing or pacifying. They become allegorical in the sense elaborated by Walter Benjamin writing about seventeenth century Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel ). When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin.45 Art historian Jenny Tennant Jackson glosses this:

216 | griselda pollock

Walter Benjamin’s study of Trauerspiel acknowledges an allegorical form where death is accepted as part of life: life as political and as psychic trauma. Understanding Benjamin’s analysis of these German mourning plays can provide us with a remarkably useful approach for thinking post-traumatically, especially with regard to the troubling representation of such events.46

The Flute at Hohenems The final element of the work was not situated in the KUB at all. Making a gesture impossible in or failed by Resnais’s film – that has so often been (wrongfully perhaps) accused of effacing the genocidal murders at the heart of the totalitarian Third Reich’s racist policies – Philipsz took the notes of the flute, the key element in Eisler’s composition for the opening scene and later the musical counterpoint to the showing of the most atrocious images of unburied corpses in Bergen-Belsen, and played it through speakers hung on trees around a tiny, walled, cemetery for the Jewish community of Hohenems with 370 gravestones preserved still despite Nazi vandalization (Figure 6.9). Hohenems Jewish community was founded in 1617 and survived until 1940 when it was forcibly dissolved under the Third Reich. Purchased from the commune of Innsbruck by descendants of former Jewish residents of Hohenems, the cemetery is now preserved and sometimes still used for burials. Cemeteries evoke the past but

Figure 6.9. Susan Philipsz (b. 1966), Night and Fog, 2016. The sound installation (flute) at the Hohenems Jewish Cemetery as the fifth part of the exhibition. Photo: Rudolf Sagmeister. Courtesy: Susan Philipsz.

lazarean sound

| 217

also the fractured historical continuity of a Jewish community in this region. They are often the first institution built by a Jewish community. They function, however, precisely in pointed contrast to the novel mode of non-human death calculatedly inflicted to dehumanize in the concentrationary and notably in exterminatory complex dedicated to the complete destruction of European Jewry. The SS eroded the humanity of their captives in every way and specifically by refusing each a grave, except ‘in the air’ – the recurring trope of Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge: Death Fugue. I have already quoted Arendt but let me remind you here again of her comment: In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.47 There can be no more profound assault on a human subject than the deprivation of a person of his or her proper treatment after death in terms of cultural conventions of burial, cremation, or other designated rituals that ensure that the end of organic life is treated as a human event. Thus, Philipsz’s linking of the humanizing individuating voice of the flute sections from Eisler’s score to the Hohenems cemetery becomes all the more pointed. The flute is the instrument whose solo is played over the opening scene of the fields with a distant rhythm of a drumbeat (tympani) (see Figure 2.5.) Extending the sound to a Jewish cemetery in this work brings this place of tombs of the disappeared community back into connection with what is being sonically evoked in the KUB. It also respects difference through distance. Making the link to a still cared-for Jewish cemetery as a point of reference performs, I would argue, a distinctive counter-Lazarean move. Working critically at its own sonic level, Philipsz’s artwork – working from the score, recording each note played by each instrument and recording it to be heard through a different speaker, hence spatialized and temporalized (differenced in Derrida’s terms) – materialized silence as an equal dimension. The artist took the elements of music created by the interaction of the player and the instrument and the pattern of sound and pause. It was this doubling of the dead and the living through sound that enabled instrument, player and listener to become the overlapping point at which a Lazarean dimension allegorically infuses the work. This occurs despite her isolation of sound from the way in which Eisler created Lazarean sound in a continuously musical score. Let me explain this apparent contradiction. Formally, via choice of instrument and unexpected tone, melody or effect, Eisler sought to allow the disturbance of the images of Resnais’s film to remain undiminished by his music even as it flowed under the edited montage. He used instrument and composition to counterpoint in unexpected ways the horror of what was being seen and described in Cayrol’s prose poem, a poem that could fall silent as words failed before the imaged atrocity. Eisler’s counter-music created and sustained an always-fragile undertone of humanizing and individuating the suffering against the gross dehumanization of the crimes depicted

218 | griselda pollock

in the image track. It was thus the persistent resistance through music, through the audit, to what was risked by showing images of atrocity, however powerful the political necessity, that produced a concentrationary art to contest the images of the concentrationary system. Not permitted to fall silent (Resnais wanted constant music), Eisler’s strategy, nonetheless, withheld the potential power of music by giving his instruments singular voices, or even rather by making them function as voices. This takes us into the theoretical domain of the way in which experimental music can work with film, which was something Resnais himself had explored in his courts métrages, his short films, made prior to Nuit et brouillard. It also concerns what Eisler, in his theorization with Adorno, was attempting to rethink in terms of banishing the bathos and banality of the way musicality was typically added to film and used manipulatively and thoughtlessly in Hollywood cinema. So Eisler faced a singular challenge when working with Resnais, in which silence was not an option because like the visual track, but not the voice over by Cayrol, his musical compositions had to be played unbroken – except for the crucial seconds of silence at the break between the credits (Theme IV) and the opening shot of the wheat field (Theme I). There is valuable testimony by Resnais about the dismay of the film technicians who had anticipated from Eisler the usual relation of dramatic music to powerful image. I recall the astonishment around us as we recorded his music. As you know, when a piece of music is recorded, this corresponding film segment is simultaneously projected in order to see if the orchestra plays in sink. At times, the technicians believe that when certain footage was projected really gruesome footage, the 32 musicians assembled in the recording room would make an all-out effort. But Eisler simply said: ‘No, this is a small piece. We’ve got one flute, one clarinet and that’s all.’ One could sense a certain uneasiness in the studio, the people were really stirred up: the usual rules were no longer valid.48 Instead, a completely different dialectic was at work that specifically inflected the horrific image towards a human pathos without risk of sentimentalization. Eisler created a compassionately grave dissonance between what was composed and thus heard – the audit – what the montage offered to a gaze that is always so much at risk of turning into sadism or revulsed abjection. I am arguing that the Lazarean counteraesthetic worked through the audit. In one sense, we can also argue that Philipsz understood Eisler’s unexpected ‘smallness’ and took it to a new degree by recording just the notes of the clarinet, the trumpet, the flute, all alone. Individuation and its pathos were exposed even more deeply. Resnais also stated: From Eisler, I learned so much about my profession and about film music, especially how to work out a sequence together with the musician;

lazarean sound

| 219

(this includes what needs to be said – very trivial words, free from any sentimentality and all literature – so as to convey to the musician what one wishes). Above all, he showed me how to avoid musical redundancies. Though this is something we all basically know, he nevertheless showed me how to apply music to create something akin to a ‘second level of perception’, something additional, contrariwise. For example, one could simplify the music the most during points of high drama and, vice versa, elaborate it significantly at moments when the eyes are no longer engaged. In this way equilibrium may be reached wherein the viewer finds a balance between both seeing and hearing. (my emphasis)49 This opens up to question what Eisler’s music was. Is the music identical with the notes that he wrote and which Philipsz then deconstructed into their solitary, disjunctive power as singularities for the auditor moving through the architectural resonance chamber of the galleries and staircase? An answer would involve a thoroughgoing musicological analysis not possible here, and not by this author. Alexander Dümling has, however, provided an overall interpretation of how sound became political commentary through dislocation from the image: Through his thin-voiced lyrical music, the composer sought to create a sense of detachment from the overwhelming power of horror. Whereas the string orchestra served to ‘populate’ the empty landscape in the prelude, the small chamber orchestral and even soloistic instrumentation accompanying the scene with a pile of corpses serves to focus attention away from these to the individual lives that they represent. As the almost tender melodic lines suggest, each of these corpses was an individual in his or her fullest humanity. Eisler resisted convention not only in his treatment of dynamics and sonority, but also in his expression. ‘The more horrible the scenes the more friendly the music’, recalled Resnais. ‘Eisler wanted to show that human optimism and hope could exist even in a concentration camp.’50 (My emphasis) I do not agree with Resnais’s concluding remark. I think it completely misses Eisler’s musical politics of humanization that are not, however, resurrectionist but rather Cayrolian. By that I mean the Lazarean functions in the allegorical way to sustain the ruin of meaning and the presence of death in life with becoming complicit with the inhuman death culture of the concentrationary or risking Adornian betrayal by art offering solace. Without a visible body, a corpse, or a revenant, and by isolating the acoustic and presenting it acousmatically, thus disrupting the musical and using the sonic to touch the sensate auditor/visitor to the installation, Philipsz made the auditors’ bodies function as the political resonance chamber of the mournful, the fragmented, the broken, the damaged, the dead, the missing, making those who can hear, hear, like Eisler,

220 | griselda pollock

both the beat of the living, the auditor her or himself, and the gap of the missing without delivery or release from the opposition.

Rebecca Horn Concert for Buchenwald, 1999 To explore, from a different angle, the challenge the concentrationary poses to art and the dangers involved in failing to negotiate the treachery of metaphor and metonymy in contrast to allegory, I want now to contrast Susan Philipsz’s acousmatic installation at KUB and Hohenems with an earlier work, a double installation, possibly indirectly referencing Juliek’s violin in Wiesel’s text, created in 1999 by the conceptual artist Rebecca Horn (b.1944), known for her body sculptures and the creation of machine automata. In Concert in Reverse made in 1987, Horn had already installed a work in Germany in which she had also dared to raise the spectre of the Third Reich’s crimes itself.51 Concert for Buchenwald (Figure 6.10) was conceived for Weimar, close to the oak forest, the Buchenwald beloved of Weimar resident, Goethe, when it was European City of Culture in 1999. Horn’s enigmatic subtitle was ‘The colony of bees undermining the moles’ subversive effort through time’. It was installed on two sites: a tram depot in the city and at the elegant Schloss Ettersberg, associated with Goethe’s residence in the city and positioned to look over towards the ‘bald hill’ originally named Ettersberg that became the site of the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Over the rich cultural, historic and national resonances of Weimar, therefore, Concert for Buchenwald announced the name of the notorious camp, about which French political deportee David Rousset had composed his book on the concentrationary universe and from which writers such as Jorge Semprun (1923–2011), Imre Kertész (1929–2016) and Elie Wiesel, and his corpse self, were liberated on 11 April 1945. Between 1938 and 1945, 238,380 people were incarcerated there. Its death toll is recorded at 56,000. In the Weimar element of her installation, Horn used a tram depot of a disused power plant in the city to install two false, glass walls whose transparent surfaces were filled in with layers of differently coloured ash created by burning ash trees of two different kinds. Inside the desolate brick room was a skip truck taken from Buchenwald that moved back and forth on tracks, crashing repeatedly into the end wall (Figure 6.10). Every time the truck banged up against the brick, a flash of electric light emerged and began a hesitant ascent. On the truck were piled wrecked, lost or abandoned musical instruments: violins, mandolins and guitars. Instead of almost visual absence in Philipsz’s installation and the creation of an indexical soundscape in space, Horn’s work depended on both metonymy and metaphor. Actual ash, from burnt trees, was archived behind the glass walls of vast blind cabinets. Yet this evocation of such a loaded element as ash evoked, without inflection, the human residues of crematoria in the extermination camps. ‘Transports’ trundle and crash. Historically transports did not crash; they delivered millions to

lazarean sound

| 221

Figure 6.10. Rebecca Horn (b. 1944), Concert for Buchenwald – Part I/ Tram Depot – Weimar/ Germany, 1999. Wood ash, glass, tramlines, wagons, musical instruments, electric light. Courtesy: Rebecca Horn.

222 | griselda pollock

their murder. On the truck are the curving forms of musical instruments. Are they themselves remains or are these all substitutions for those arriving or being carried already dead? In conflating the horrors of death factories turning living beings to ash within hours of arrival with the prolonged torture of living through the concentrationary universe such as Buchenwald represents, Horn’s metonyms link unspecified missing people to their reduced substance. Yet the ash from different trees created mesmerizing patterns behind their museological and reflecting glass walls. The work also visually incites pathos for the abandoned possessions without indexing the missing hands that once plucked some strings but not necessarily these ones. There is sound in this installation, what Martin Mosebach names ‘the nerve-grinding noise of machinery’ – is this a reference to industrial murder that was a death factory? He also tries to evoke the voice of the violins and mandolins, the memory of their songs.52 He continues: Immaterial though the precious voice is, when one is standing in Rebecca Horn’s Depot it is as if the voice, many hundred voices belonging to the demolished, shattered instruments, were being loaded onto the iron wagons, as if this truck like a barge man were collecting the voices of the dead violins and ferrying them over to another shore. Over there everything is walled up – there is no such thing as the beyond on the same level. So now, with their unbroken energy the voices are seeking their own way. In restrained explosions, in flashes of lightning similar to wandering willo’-the-wisps, they climb upwards. A transport, the end of a transport, a wall, a transformation, a flight, an escape to the air, a blinding glare and a disappearance.53 This is poetic but problematic in the clash of images and the mixing of traditions. Mosebach evokes the Classical myth of the passage to the underworld, invoking the figure of Charon ferrying dead souls across the River Styx while other disembodied souls climb upward into Eurydicean light. The artist wrote a poem to accompany her work. Her imagery suggests that the work is to perform a missing funeral – of the instruments, that stand in for bodies permitted, according to the poem, what was never allowed in the concentrationary world – a soul – and sleep, waiting for salvation. In death they make a sound: Street tram depot in Weimar landscape of the 56,000 laying the tracks through the gate into the interior a small transport waggon from Buchenwald moves to the rhythm of the heart against the rear wall the collision generates electric sparks like soul threads climbing up to illuminate the ashen landscape Les funérailles des instruments

lazarean sound

| 223

The violins, bodies, are still sleeping on the tracks waiting patiently for their transport of salvation. The truck runs over a violin’s neck: crushed, it quietly emits a sound. (My emphases) Let me recall some of Elie Wiesel’s Night on the violin of Juliek. The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek’s soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again. I shall never forget Juliek. . . . I do not know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.54 Whatever the intention of the artist and her desire to disallow forgetting in Weimar of complicity with what was done at Buchenwald so nearby and across Europe, the work raises Adornian anxieties in the context of this particular study of the poetics of the Lazarean. Highlighting the poetic figures collaged in these verses, I am drawing attention to an aesthetic gesture which may be betrayed, in Adorno’s sense, too swiftly by its chosen words, tropes, metaphors. In a section on ‘The Problem of Suffering’, Adorno wrote in 1962: The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting. . . . Yet this suffering, what Hegel called consciousness of adversity, also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. The most important artists of the age have realised this.55 In this passage, from his second commentary in 1962 on the impossibility of art after Auschwitz, Adorno asserts both that art has no right to exist and that it has an ethical obligation to exist – knowing it will fail. Adorno means that it is inevitable that art confronting this history will ultimately betray its imagined purpose. It is trapped in what it must do because the crime calls out for art to translate it and affect us. Yet, that same art cannot but aestheticize by figuration of a reality that exceeds any representation and its desire to achieve affect. There may be, however, a moment in which, by virtue of thoughtful formalization, betrayal is suspended long enough for us to grant to the aesthetic its ethical obligation to face, and to seek to give fragile voice to, suffering in a world ‘where men exist who beat people until their bones break in their bodies’ – Adorno is quoting from Sartre.56 By using real objects and layering them with poetic associations, Horn’s text and work, I suggest, formally and semiotically, barely maintains this suspension long

224 | griselda pollock

enough. In my reading of this nonetheless powerful and affecting work, the term transport cannot be linked to salvation; such death is no longer sleep. Souls were not allowed . . . and on and on. Yet her work is not mute. Grinding machinic sounds of the wagons on the tracks replace the ‘silenced voices’ of the instruments’ empty bodies, using the sonic to aggravate the pathos of the scene.

Cayrol and the Politics of Grammar As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the meeting of Eisler and Resnais at the editing desk and composing suite in the final month of making Nuit et brouillard was unexpected by both parties. We have to imagine the studio of the film production company where 32 minutes of film have been finalized and they are awaiting the laying down of two elements of the soundtrack. We know that Cayrol suffered a massive shock when shown the rough cut of the montage of the film in November 1955. As the images plunged him once again into ‘le concentrationat’, he declared he became mad again.57 Refusing to expose himself once more to what was at that time still almost 40 minutes of filmic horror, he went away and wrote a long text. Poetic rather than descriptive, the text was unusable and unrelated to the structure of Resnais’s film. Chris Marker came forward and rewrote Cayrol’s text to match it to the sequences. The poet was then persuaded to return to the studio, and between Marker and Cayrol, Resnais’s montage was slowly replayed so that the Cayrolian poetics could be plotted, sentence by sentence, sequence by sequence, into alignment with the image track. Cayrol’s text for Nuit et brouillard refuses testimony. As I have already mentioned, Cayrol used, for both victims and perpetrators, the neutral third person pronoun on: neither masculine nor feminine, neither French nor Jewish: one suffered, one watched, one was shaved. It is only in the final sequence that the text declares: Au moment où je vous parle/the present in which I speak to you and that moment is set inside the desolate remains of Auschwitz-Birkenau.58 In its present moment of shooting in 1955, the film returns to the place, to a particular and complicated camp, the Auschwitz complex, which has become for us since Adorno’s writing, the camp, presented as a landscape haunted by its ‘nine million dead’ (Cayrol’s text), a landscape reconstituting itself as nature as the grass grows over the site once muddied and trampled by anguished feet. Nature’s indifference becomes the metaphor for, and hence a warning about, failed memory: for memory can become opaque and sluggish, overgrown, attenuating the traces in the dulling passage of time. To counter this natural phenomenon of erasure requires a different response, active, even fictive in some dimensions, in the present, and projective: I (Cayrol) who speak to you, speak of nous (us). Who amongst us keeps vigil to prevent the arrival of new executioners? Will they look different from us? Is that us of the now like Wiesel, the Lazarean subject who could not recognize himself in the mirror or are we those who must look at those like Eliezer in the face?

lazarean sound

| 225

Yet, suggests Cayrol, there are some amongst us who sincerely look upon these ruins. Yet, he implies, we might be tempted to look only to let hope spring forth that the concentrationary monster lies dead beneath them. That is a false hope as is the belief one can be cured from this new disease that Cayrol names a concentrationary plague. It is easier to believe it happened once and over there, and then comes the untranslatable phrase by which Cayrol’s poetics and grammar affirm the continuity between what has been and has been shown by the film and what may be and perhaps already is: qu’on crie sans fin. This is impossible to translate in ways that capture the structure of the French. English translations could use scream, shout, cry out. In English, cry contains weeping, but also screaming and shouting. Pleurer in French is to weep. Qui crie? Who cries out? In Cayrol’s French, literally it screams, but on is also any person. A human is crying/screaming/crying out eternally. There is thus agonized sound, present, persistent, gerundive. From the poetically accompanied, sonically underpinned visual image, the concept of a voice emerges at the film’s conclusion, indefinite and crying out: both expressing its pain and calling to the world. On crie and endlessly. In Paul Celan’s German translation this is rendered: der Schrei nicht verstummt, literally ‘the scream never falls silent’. English translations try turning ‘on’ into humanity – too grandiose. Others invoke those ‘deaf to the endless cry’ losing the acousmatic indeterminacy of a scream without a specified subject: a sound without an end. The subject ‘on’ is not a universal subject losing all particularity – such has been the critique of Resnais and Cayrol’s film for not specifying the Jewishness or the Romani identity of the victims of the mass murder. The subject of the verb, on, is the revealed fact of human vulnerability everywhere and at any time now to a continuing political novelty experimentally, and for 12 years systematically, enacted by the fascists of the Third Reich, from whose universe the Lazarean is both the revenant from the camp-tomb and the condition created by the camp-tomb, everywhere. It is the dark allegory of a ruined sociality that is screaming – but not necessarily heard. I opened this chapter by indirectly asking why there would be a musical soundtrack to this film. By 1955, Resnais was an established maker of short films, many about artists, with short poetic voice-overs. His cinematic language frequently matched contemporary avant-garde musical composition to his formally radically montaged filming of stills and found moving image. He was not a filmmaker to commit any of the errors Eisler and Adorno condemned: leitmotif, melody and euphony, visual justification, illustration, stock music, clichés, standardized interpretation. As Graham McCann defines their critique: ‘The commercial movie score encouraged identification: emotional proximity was achieved by means of a familiar musical language and an identity of sound and vision which screened our contradictions and projected an impression of wholeness with which the spectator could identify.’59 Even if, like Cayrol or Wiesel, Eisler had not been in a camp, he did understand the economic and political systems it also symptomatized as he had seen the fascist face of America

226 | griselda pollock

at HUAC and lived in a Stalinist state, the GDR, during the period of widespread national liberation movements for decolonization. I have earlier described his shock before what Resnais’s montage revealed in its silent starkness. It must have been enormous. We have witness accounts from Ida Pozner who insisted on Eisler’s urgent desire to create music for this project while being almost unable to watch the images. The process tipped him into ever-deeper depression. Olga Wormser also testified to Eisler’s despair at being confronted with this world of horror.60 This then produces the effect of a primary trauma created for Eisler in that encounter via the image and his gaze. We can now recognize that the music he composed in a very short time to accompany this film becomes historically important, therefore, as the first instance of someone attempting to create, on the audio track, in the musical aesthetic legacy of Schoenberg and experimental avant-garde European – autonomous – music, a response to a stark encounter with these images alone, nakedly exposed silently to the gaze. In this primary encounter, Eisler created a dissonantly compassionate audit for the film’s future viewers/listeners. We no longer have access to his initial experience because the film we encounter is the film already modified, transformed and supplemented and implanted in our memories as much by Eisler’s music as by Cayrol’s words. Against our recoil from what we are made to see, we are ethically and politically interpellated by their combined audit. In Adorno’s terms for the paradox of art ‘after Auschwitz’, Eisler is the first composer to have to think on his feet in the immediacy of having to create an aesthetic response as he sat in front of what Resnais’s visual montage had made visible as the concentrationary system. Eisler’s soundtrack is a creation that we can name concentrationary music as aesthetic resistance to the concentrationary universe. Its writer battled with the depression that the encounter with Nazi totalitarianism produced in one living the continuing Stalinist totalitarianism that he was witnessing in contemporary East Germany having despairingly witnessed there also the brutal defeat of the workers’ uprising in the GDR in 1953. In his composition for Resnais he comforted himself with a dialectic of dissonance and disconnection yielding to achingly moving passages of empathetic melody in which he used solitary violin strings or flutes to individuate the imaged corpses and softly, in the final scene, to incite respect for those whose invisible cemetery was formed by the broken slabs of the exploded crematoria, leaving us with thirteen beats of the kettle drum. In her carefully created aniconic installation at the KUB, Susan Philipsz’s work, I am suggesting, draws out from within both Eisler’s musical and the textual traces of his politically situated response to Resnais’s visual presentation of totalitarian terror and racist horror, a Lazarean sound precisely because it refuses even the anxious solace created by Eisler’s musical flow, a musicality that still functions, despite Schoenberg, as a remnant of Beethoven’s majestic concerto that Juliek played to himself in defiance of his own hideous condition of imminent death from exhaustion, starvation and inhuman brutality. Working with architectural spaces and the bodies and minds of auditors, foregoing music, while using its sonic elements, making audible the body

lazarean sound

| 227

that makes a sound with and from an instrument, Philipsz’s Night and Fog (2016) leaves us with indexical notes orphaned from their living players acousmatically dispersed in the space they articulate and yet linked by the action of each playing of each note to a person. These created sounds become the sonic revenants of a history reverberating in both the architectural spaces and body-psyches in which we, auditors, are inhabited and incited to critical, political reflection by the haunting, agitating Lazarean autonomy of the auditory.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds. Reputed as an international, postcolonial, queer, feminist analyst of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she has recently been writing on trauma and the aesthetic in modern and contemporary art and film, drawing on Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula, and on the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism. Her related publications include After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester, 2013); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum and Wild Pansy Press, 2013); Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2014); Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2015); and the monograph, Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018), a study of the single monumental artwork, Life? or Theatre?, of a GermanJewish artist murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

Notes 1. E. Pfrimmer and A. Resnais, ‘Für Hanns Eisler’, in Sinn und Form: Sonderheft Hanns Eisler (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1964), 372; translated in A. Dümling, ‘Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A musical counterpoint to the cinematic portrayal of terror’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18:4 (1998), 575–84, 582. 2. I have already discussed, in Chapter 2, the literary, operatic and everyday meanings of the phrase meaning vanishing without a trace, taken up by Hitler in his decree of December 1941 determining that those who resisted German occupation of their countries would, when arrested, be deported to concentration camps where they would disappear without a trace in night and fog. Their prison garb was marked with N N as a code for their specific punishment of untraceability. 3. Hohenems had a Jewish community recorded from 1617. It grew to a highpoint in the mid-nineteenth century by which time the community represented 12 percent of the population. The last deportation from the town was in 1942. Reconstruction of one synagogue began only in 2001 but a Jewish Museum had been established in 1991 to conserve surviving material remains. The cemetery remains in use for descendents of the former Hohenems Jewish residents, 370 of its once 500 gravestones remaining intact. There is now a complete database of the stones and inscriptions (see www .hohenemsgenealogie.at/gen/showalbum.php?albumID=3). 4. See G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn, 2012).

228 | griselda pollock

5. G. Pollock and M. Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema. 6. Artworking is a term created by the artist Bracha Ettinger (b.1948) at the intersection of aesthetics, feminism and psychoanalysis. The concept of Arbeit – work – became significant for Freud’s shift from a cathartic to an economic understanding of the operation of the psyche. Freud created the following concepts: Traumarbeit: dreamwork, Trauerarbeit: the work of mourning, and used the verb durcharbeiten, meaning working through, to explain his new understanding of psychic transformation. See S. Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’ [1914], Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 145–57. Shifting away from representational theories of art and extending formal theories of art, Ettinger is proposing that artistic processes can also be transformative at both formal and psycho-affective levels. The concept of ‘art as a transport station of trauma’ is also created by Bracha Ettinger. See Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985–1999 (Bruxelles: Palais des BeauxArts and Gent: Ludion, 2000) and for commentary and elaboration of both concepts see G. Pollock, After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 7. J. Mowitt, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 4. 8. Mowitt, Sounds, 5. 9. ‘Je ne sentais pas de silence dans les courts métrages que j’ai fait. Il faillait toujours sentir quelque chose’ My translation. S. Lindeperg, ‘Le Chant Continu d’Eisler’, Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 133. 10. For a detailed and musicological analysis of the political tension within Eisler’s soundtrack of his musical combination of Brechtian distanciation and sentimental if unsettling empathy to propose a form of aesthetic witnessing, see A. L. Wlodarski, ‘The composer as witness: Hanns Eisler’s Film Score to Nuit et brouillard ’ in Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36–56. 11. Interestingly this film, made in 1943, was about the assassination by the resistance in Czechoslavkia on 27 March 1942 of Hitler’s no. 2, Reinhard Heydrich, the SS military dictator of Bohemia and Moravia at the time, and one of the chief architects of the genocide. The building and operating of the four dedicated extermination camps in Poland were named Operation Reinhard. Eisler was nominated for an Oscar for this score. 12. T. Adorno and H. Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; referenced edition: London: The Athlone Press, 1994). 13. Set up in 1938, the committee investigated alleged acts of disloyalty and subversion by civilians and organizations said to be tied to communism. In 1947, it turned its attention to the Hollywood film industry and this led to the blacklisting of over 3,000 people. A group known as the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted for refusing to answer questions that might implicate themselves or others. Eisler was one of the first to be blacklisted being dubbed by HUAC members the ‘Karl Marx of music’. He never was a member of the Communist Party but had worked closely with those who were, such as Bertolt Brecht. Composers Stravinsky, Copeland and Bernstein as well as Charlie Chaplin raised money for his defence but Eisler was deported in 1948. 14. Cited http://eislermusic.com/depart.htm. Last accessed 17 December 2017. 15. S. Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’ histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 131–39. 16. This musical descendent of Handel and Bruch was borrowed from his composition in 1954 for Johannes Becher’s play about the German attack on the Soviet Union, Winterschlacht. For a full musical and historical analysis of the score see K. Breyer, ‘Introduction’, in K. Breyer and O. Dahin (eds), Film music for ‘Nuit et brouillard’ in Hanns Eisler Complete Edition (HEGA) Vol. 23. edited by Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft Serie VI (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel 2014), xxvi. This volume also reprints the complete scores. 17. T. D. Trummer, ‘Music in Space and Space in Music in Susan Philips in Bregenz’ in Susan Philipsz Night and Fog (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2016), 40 18. Trummer, ‘Music in Space and Space in Music in Susan Philips in Bregenz’, 40. 19. Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films, 47. 20. Trummer, ‘Music in Space and Space in Music in Susan Philips in Bregenz’, 40.

lazarean sound

| 229

21. T. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ [1965], in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1992), 300–18, 313. 22. I must thank my colleague Dr. Sam Belinfante for reminding me once again of this passage in a book we read together during his studies at the University of Leeds. 23. Wiesel, Night, 94. 24. E. Wiesel, Night, 95. Extract from Night by Elie Wiesel, published by Penguin Books © Elie Wiesel 1972, 1985. Reproduced by permission of Sheil Land Associates Ltd. Excerpts from Night by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel. Copyright © 1985 by Elie Wiesel, Translation Copyright © by Marion Wiesel. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 25. In an earlier chapter, when Eliezer and his father arrive in Auschwitz III-Monowitz they meet two musicians, Juliek and a Dutch violinist, Louis. ‘He complained that they would not let him play Beethoven. Jews were not allowed to play German music’. Wiesel, Night, 49. For the reverse proscription see M. Hass, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 26. Composed in 1806 and neglected until 1844 when it was revived, the Beethoven concerto was first recorded in 1925 by Josef Wolfstahl and again 1929. My question is: did the boy Eliezer from Sighet know this music as Beethoven or did later encounters with it enable retrospective recognition of the named music. Had he learned of it through Louis and Juliek while in Auschwitz-Monowitz? 27. E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 95–98. Face is not the specific visage but any part of the human body that speaks human suffering and thus calls for an ethical response in the one who encounters the other. 28. Born in Glasgow in 1965, she studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and at the University of Ulster in Belfast where she became the director of the Catalyst Arts Centre for several years. In 2010 she won the Turner prize awarded by the Tate Gallery in Britain for the most outstanding exhibition by that the year of an artist under the age of 50. 29. With immediate effect after 1933, modern art had been withdrawn from public view in the art galleries of Germany, and was sold at auction to raise funds for the Third Reich. Modernist artists had been dismissed from their positions in the art schools and forced into exile. Curators sympathetic to modernism had been sacked from their positions. In a campaign that culminated in an exhibition that travelled to eleven cities across Germany titled Entartete Kunst/Degenerate Art between 1937 and 1938 the art works of the modernist avant-garde were subject to ridiculing and degrading representation through association with mental and physical degeneracy. It was, therefore, no mean feat for Bode to attempt to re-educate a German public thus instructed by their former government to perceive modernism as antithetical to the clean, the wholesome, the rational, the healthy and the German. 30. On Bode and modern art at DOCUMENTA in 1955, see Walter Grasskampf, ‘For example, DOCUMENTA, or how is art history produced’ in R. Greenberg, B. Ferguson, S. Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996), 48–56; and ‘“Degenerate Art” and DOCUMENTA I: Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed’ in I. Rogoff and D. Sherman (eds), Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses and Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 163–91. 31. For the distinction between these two forms of memory, see G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Terror in Popular Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 32. Christov-Bakargiev defined four positions for artists in that moment: ‘On stage. I am playing a role, I am a subject in the act of re-performing. Under siege. I am encircled by the other, besieged by others. In a state of hope, or optimism. I dream, I am the dreaming subject of anticipation. On retreat. I am withdrawn, I choose to leave the others, I sleep. Each position is a state of mind, and relates to time in a specific way: while the retreat suspends time, being on stage produces a vivid and lively time of the here and now, the continuous present; while hope releases time through the sense of a promise, of time opening up and being unending, the sense

230 | griselda pollock

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

of being under siege compresses time, to the degree that there is no space beyond the elements of life that are tightly bound around us. Artists, artworks, and events occupy these four positions simultaneously.’ Statement by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; https://universes.art/biennials/documenta/2012/. Last accessed 21 December 2017. Theodor Adorno first used the phrase in 1949, extended his discussion in 1962 and returned to its elaboration in 1966. It was not until 2012 that the problematic historical foundation of DOCUMENTA was brought to the forefront of the conception and commissions of artworks for dOCUMENTA (13). As early as 1992, however, in her work: . . . from the Transit Bar (1992) made for Documenta IX, CzechCanadian artist and child survivor Vera Frenkel (b.1938) had forged a link between her own childhood experience of escape and forced exile after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the migration crisis post-1989. The politics of Christov-Barkgiev’s insistence on historical memory was in part incited by the conditions of trauma, collapse and recovery that had marked the political social and economic events on a world scale since the beginning of the twenty-first century and notably since the previous DOCUMENTA in 2007. D. M. Mintert, Das frühe Konzentrationslager Kemna und das sozialistische Milieu im Bergischen Land. Ruhr University Bochum, doctoral dissertation (2007). A recent research project into music and the Holocaust is titled Performing the Jewish Archive directed by Dr. Stephen Muir at the University of Leeds. Lisa Peschel specifically researches the theatrical and musical performances of Terezin. See http://ptja.leeds.ac.uk. The iconography of the train as an icon for the Holocaust evolved slowly. It was used in 1947 by Polish director Wanda Jakubowska for her fictionalized film Ostatni etap (The Last Stage; The Last Stop) based on her own experiences in Auschwitz I as an imprisoned Polish resistance fighter. Alain Resnais also used the archive footage of the departure of loaded cattle trucks filmed at Westerbork camp in the Netherlands and included a quotation of the dramatic scene trains arriving at night from Jacubowska’s The Last Stage (1947). Harun Farocki made his own film on the Westerbork footage, Respite, 2007 (40 mins, silent, black and white video). Lanzmann’s Shoah uses repeated footage of contemporary freight trains to serve as punctuation points, inciting moments of reflection between his interviews and their revelations. I am making up this word to animate a reference to the Beethoven concerto played by Juilek and witnessed by Eliezer in Elie Wiesel’s book Night. Juliek’s performance of this famous concerto installed music in the space of horror while Philipsz’s breaking up of instruments and even of each sound formally registers the destruction of the world in which concerted music was created and possible. Curatorial Essay by Dr. Linda Schädler, Research Associate, Institute of Art History, University of Zürich; www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-philipsz-war-damaged-musicalinstruments/exhibition-essay. B. Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Details of Eisler biography are given in the first part of this chapter. Set up in 1938, the committee investigated alleged acts disloyalty and subversion by civilians and organizations said to be tied to communism. In 1947, it turned its attention to the Hollywood film industry and this led to the blacklisting of over 3,000 people. A group known as the Hollywood Ten was blacklisted for refusing to answer questions that might implicate themselves or others. Eisler was one of the first to be blacklisted, being dubbed by HUAC members the ‘Karl Marx of music’. He never was a member of the Communist Party but had worked closely with those who were, such as Bertolt Brecht. Stravinsky, Copeland and Bernstein as well as Charlie Chaplin raised money for his defence but he was deported in 1948. Alexander Forbes, ‘Susan Philipsz at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof ’, Art-net (23 January 2014), https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/review-susan-philipsz-at-berlins-hamburger-bahnhof-1275. Last accessed 9 August 2017. S. Philipsz in Susan Philipsz: Night and Fog (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2016), 10. Essays by Susan Philipsz, Thomas D. Trummer, Theodor Ringborg, Linda Schädler.

lazarean sound

| 231

45. W. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 1985, 177–78. First published German text: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963, written c. 1916−25. 46. J. Tennant Jackson, ‘Courbet’s Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in The Painter’s Studio’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-traumatic Cultures. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 80. 47. H. Arendt, ‘The Concentration Camps,’ The Partisan Review, XV:7 (July 1948), 743–63. 48. E. Pfrimmer and A. Resnais, ‘Für Hanns Eisler’, in Sinn und Form: Sonderheft Hanns Eisler. Berlin: Akademie der Künste,1964, 372, translated in Albrecht Dümling, ‘Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A musical counterpoint to the cinematic portrayal of terror’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18:4 (1998), 580. 49. E. Pfrimmer and A. Resnais, ‘Für Hanns Eisler’, 578–79. 50. Pfrimmer and Resnais, ‘Für Hanns Eisler’, 581. 51. As part of the Sculpture Project at Münster (which takes place every ten years) in 1987, Rebecca Horn created an installation, Concert in Reverse in an abandoned tower that had been used by the SS for torture and executions. ‘In 1987, visitors could once again enter the building. They followed a path through the damp, dark, cellar-like building, accompanied by the rhythmic knocking of small steel hammers on the walls and ceilings of the cells. On the way, they would pass by a pair of snakes in a terrarium; eventually they would reach a platform on the floor above (the remains of a cell, left after a bomb attack) and be able to look down into the circular atrium. There in the trees, hung a large, waterfilled glass funnel, out of which every 20 seconds a drop of water would fall 12 meters into a round basin, thereby producing its own rhythm – becoming a “counter concert.”’ In 1997, the installation was revised in 1997 and made into a permanent exhibit. ‘The visitor will find a somewhat altered situation: the floors have been levelled; the concrete stairs and the trees in the atrium have disappeared. The installation itself is also somewhat changed. The large funnel no longer hangs in the trees, but is instead solidly installed as a giant plexiglas funnel, like a roof over the courtyard. The problematic snakes have been replaced by durable electric metal tongues, which undulate around and away from each other.’ www.skulptur-projekte.de/archiv/97/horn/index.htm. Last accessed 9 February 2017. 52. M. Mosebach, ‘Concert for Buchenwald’, in R. Horn, The Colonies of Bees Undermining the Moles’ Subversive Effort Through Time: Concert for Buchenwald. Zurich: Scalo, 1999, 14. 53. Mosebach, ‘Concert for Buchenwald’, 14. 54. E. Wiesel, Night, 95. Extract from Night by Elie Wiesel, published by Penguin Books © Elie Wiesel 1972, 1985. Reproduced by permission of Sheil Land Associates Ltd. Excerpts from Night by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel. Copyright © 1985 by Elie Wiesel, Translation Copyright © by Marion Wiesel. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 55. T. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ [1965], in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1992, 300–318, 312. 56. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ [1965], 312. 57. Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 120. 58. M.-L. Basuyaux, Témoigner clandestinement – Les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol. Paris; Garnier Classiques, 2010. 59. G. McCann, ‘Introduction’, in T. Adorno and M. Eisler, Composing for the Films. London Athlone Press, 1994, xxxiv. 60. These are documented in Sylvie Lindeperg’s chapter on the soundtrack titled tellingly: ‘Le chant continu d’Eisler’ [The unending song of Eisler], Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 131–39.

Bibliography Adorno, T. ‘Commitment’ [1965], in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1992, 300–18.

232 | griselda pollock

Adorno, T. and H. Eisler. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; referenced edition: London: Continuum Press, 2010. Allen, M. T. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Arendt, H. ‘The Concentration Camps,’ Partisan Review, XV:7 (July 1948), 743–63. ———. ‘Social Sciences and Concentration Camps’, in J. Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930– 1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1994, 232–47. Basuyaux, M.-L. Témoigner clandestinement – Les récits lazaréens de Jean Cayrol. Paris: Garnier Classiques, 2010. Benjamin, W. Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 1985. Breyer, K. and O. Dahin, (eds). ‘Film music for Nuit et brouillard’ in Hanns Eisler Complete Edition (HEGA) Vol. 23, ed. Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft Serie VI. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 2014. Dümling, A. ‘Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A musical counterpoint to the cinematic portrayal of terror’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18:4 (1998), 575–84. Ettinger, B. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985–1999. Bruxelles: Palais des Beaux Arts and Gent: Ludion, 2000. Freud, S. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’ [1914], Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press, 1950, 145–57. Forbes, A. ‘Susan Philipsz at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof ’, Art-net (23 January 2014), https://news .artnet.com/exhibitions/review-susan-philipsz-at-berlins-hamburger-bahnhof-1275. Last accessed 9 August 2017. Gilbert, S. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Grasskampf, W. ‘“Degenerate Art” and DOCUMENTA I: Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed’ in I. Rogoff and D. Sherman (eds), Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses and Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 163–191. ———. ‘For example, DOCUMENTA, or how is art history produced’ in R. Greenberg, B. Ferguson, S. Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 1996, 48–56. Hass, M. Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Horn, R. 1999. The Colonies of Bees Undermining the Moles’ Subversive Effort Through Time: Concert for Buchenwald. Zurich: Scalo, 1999. Kane, B. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kligerman, E. Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Levinas, E. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Lindeperg, S. Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007. ———. ‘Night and Fog: Inventing a Perspective’, in J.-M. Frodon (ed.), Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, trans. A. Harrison and T. Maes. New York: SUNY Press, 2010, 63–84. McCann, G. ‘Introduction’, in T. Adorno and M. Eisler (eds), Composing for Films. London: Continuum Press, 2010, vii–xxxi. Mintert, D. M. Das frühe Konzentrationslager Kemna und das sozialistische Milieu im Bergischen Land. Ruhr University Bochum, doctoral dissertation (2007). Mosebach, M. ‘Concert for Buchenwald’ in R. Horn, The Colonies of Bees Undermining the Moles’ Subversive Effort Through Time: Concert for Buchenwald. Zurich: Scalo, 1999. Mowitt, J. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pfrimmer, E. and A. Resnais. ‘Für Hanns Eisler’, in Sinn und Form: Sonderheft Hanns Eisler. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1964. Philipsz, S. Susan Philipsz Night and Fog: Essays by Susan Philipsz, Thomas D. Trummer, Theodor Ringborg, Linda Schädler. Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2016.

lazarean sound

| 233

Pollock, G. and M. Silverman, (eds). Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. London and New York: Berghahn, 2011. Roseman, M. The Wannsee Protocol and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration. London: St. Martin’s Press, 2001; London: Allen Lane, 2002. Rousset, D. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1946; translated as The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947; and reissued in 1951 as A World Apart. Schädler, L. Susan Philipsz: War Damaged Musical Instruments: Exhibition Essay. Tate Museum; www.tate .org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-philipsz-war-damaged-musical-instruments/exhibi tion-essay. 2015. Last accessed 2 August 2017. Tennant Jackson, J. ‘Courbet’s Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in The Painter’s Studio’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-traumatic Cultures. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 77–101. Trummer, T. D. ‘Music in Space and Space in Music in Susan Philips in Bregenz’, in Susan Philipsz Night and Fog. Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017, 30–50. Wiesel, E. Night [1958], trans. M. Wiesel. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Wlodarski, A. L. ‘The composer as witness: Hanns Eisler’s Film Score to Nuit et brouillard’ in Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 36–56.

Concluding Remarks Griselda Pollock

The disaster is such that it does not occur as an event in the ‘normal’ run of things; the displacement in time that it provokes irradiates the world, especially as seen from the perspective of the one who has returned. —Patrick ffrench Edited volumes constitute a transdisciplinary mode of exploring a shared concept. Having travelled through this volume and been taken down different pathways all relating to, and yet different in their takes on, the concept of a concentrationary art, the reader may wish for consolidation of the significance of the concept of the concentrationary as a prelude to suggesting where it leaves us now. What is the function of historic retrospect on the most egregious of modern assaults on humanity and its democratic aspirations? What has art to contribute to what might appear as a political history? In writing, each of us has been discovering the possibility in, and testing the value of, the proposition of the concentrationary as a critical tool for cultural analysis, an insight into a historical event, and a window onto a political logic resisted by different aesthetic practices. We have not arrived at unified conclusions but make clear its critical purchase in unexpected ways. In this book, we have explored the historically specific relation between the concentrationary – a term with wide political-theoretical currency in the circles of returning deportees in France after 1945 – and the aesthetic figure of the Lazarean – a unique contribution by poet, novelist and returning deportee Jean Cayrol to aesthetic reflection on writing in the wake of the concentrationary. Along the several lines of investigation represented here, this book thus stages a specific encounter between the aesthetic and the political. Since we initiated the project, Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation in 2007, Max Silverman and I have sought to re-establish the concentrationary as a critically useful term of both political and cultural-aesthetic analysis. We have also been asking what an engagement with art – literary, visual, sonic, cinematic – can bring to the expanding studies of, on the one hand, historical trauma, cultural memory, mourning and commemoration, and, on the other hand, the political-cultural analysis of the subtle and persistent defacement of what political theorist Hannah Arendt termed ‘the human condition’. Arendt formulated her term

236 | griselda pollock

to insist upon the long-term significance of the concentrationary experiment for a political humanity in the context of defining humanity as quintessentially political. The political is not the issues of parties and divisions. Drawing on, and reframing, the Greek concept of the polis, Arendt envisages the political as a space of the gathering together of equal citizens to speak, listen and act, where action institutes the new, and hence is creative. In the light of this interpretation, Arendt characterized the concentrationary experiment as the nemesis of the political precisely because, in the pursuit of total domination, there had been a systematic attempt to eradicate three elements that define the political as the only stage on which we act as humans by exercising the capacity for speech and action in our fundamental plurality. Dehumanization was achieved by horrifying physical torture. Its object was the destruction of the human in the prisoners, ultimately reduced to an identical mass of physiologically desperate organisms seeking to hold onto life. This was thus a psychological crime against humanity. The concept of the concentrationary goes further. It identifies not only the character of a historical structure associated with totalitarian regimes during the midtwentieth century – actual camps – but also the long-term effect of the camp as both event and form on culture and aesthetics in the twentieth century after 1945. This second dimension occurs precisely because the concentrationary was never confined to actual camps. Its origins in imperialism predate both Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps and Stalin’s gulags. Its logic can encompass a whole society whether it uses camps, as in the dictatorships of Chile, Brazil or Argentina, or whether a system such as apartheid in South Africa is enacted by an elected government as a state policy. Arendt defines the German camps of the 1930s and 1940s as the experimental sites of an anti-political novelty that effectively erodes or even destroys not only the individual humanity of each inmate, but as importantly, the political life of the society in which camps occur. Paradoxically it is the study of the concentrationary that makes visible to us what is ‘the human condition’. Its lineaments emerge into theoretical visibility as a result of the systematic totalitarian attempt at the destruction of moral subjectivity, the possibility for action and the capacity for thought, prisoner by prisoner. The significance of, and the necessity for, invention of a concept – the concentrationary – arises in this double space of historical innovation and its insinuated after-effect, information about which was carried by returnees and made known to the rest of the world precisely through their attempts to find forms, not of testimony to their past suffering, but of a warning about a discovered present and a menaced future. The concentrationary refers both to a structure and to a subjectivity. It incites both political theorization and aesthetic realization that will make its menace accessible to us through the affective and thought-inciting power of art. Not only cognitively or intellectually, the meaning of any assault on the human condition forces a reconfiguration at this intersection of what are already entangled: the political and the imaginative, the formal and the performed, the thought and the lived.

concluding remarks

| 237

In her first major intervention, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt offered a genealogical study of this anti-political assault of the pursuit of total domination epitomized and systematized by the major authoritarian experiments of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich. As a result of her close analysis of the writings of those who analyzed the concentration camp system as a system, as a universe set apart yet integral to the societies of these two totalitarianisms, Hannah Arendt wrote a second volume to discern what totalitarianism had attempted to destroy and hence what post-war society had to learn to restore, sustain and re-elaborate. What she thus named the human condition is neither a nature nor an essence. As a condition, it is the very possibility of a political human existence. The political does not only refer to institutions of government or electoral systems, where politicians are often reduced to being the managers of economies rather than the initiators and guardians of the spaces of our socio-political community. The human condition is both a consciousness and a practice in which, through speech and action of singular subjects working together, the political space and possibility of our participation in self-realization and the determination of our ‘being together in plurality’ is performatively invoked. In her pre-feminist insensitivity to gender plurality using the collective ‘men’, Arendt makes her case thus: Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things and matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the condition per quam – of all political life.1 Political life is that activity that is outside of labour, what we do to survive and work, what we make using the materials of the world. The latter constitutes the realm of the economic, while the former is based on our physicality and its needs. The political is a different order of activity because it is both the product and the realization of the defining character of the human as the political being: plurality and the capacity to act, to create the new. Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with the laws of behaviour, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who has ever lived, lives, or will live.2 The political is the realization of a condition that totalitarianism has to abolish in order to subject all people to total domination. Thus, people qua people are superfluous to the authoritarian system. It is neither their labour nor their work but their speak-

238 | griselda pollock

ing, acting humanity that the concentrationary logic destroys. The exterminatory racism of the Third Reich was an extreme model of annihilation of plurality by mass murder. The concentrationary, on the other hand, was the instrument of domination in the countries occupied by the Reich. There, populations were subjected to the fascist order while those who resisted that order were violently punished by execution or were deported for slave labour under policies aimed to destroy the incarcerated and terrorize those who remained outside. The latter were thus left with the dread knowledge of the disappearance of their loved ones to a hideous fate without being traceable. This double-sided process – disappearing the resisters and making known something of this fate to those remaining at home under fascist rule – is particularly significant in terms of being able to extend our analysis of the event to see it as a structure that can exist in the so-called free market work of contemporary capitalist societies. Arendt arrived at this realization of the assault on the human condition because of her close study of the written reports, which often took the form of imaginative representations, of those who had endured Hitler’s actualized concentrationary universe between 1933 and 1945. Many of these writers, as resistance fighters, were already political thinkers whose background made them able to identify the camp as an anti-political system. What they sought in their writing – often by borrowing from various literary tropes, such as Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi or even Dante’s Purgatory and sometimes turning to fiction – was to convey to the world outside the camps the gravity and character of the assault on their humanity, sustained by the programmatic reduction of the inmates from being political, social and moral subjects to a kind of species being struggling simply to stay alive. The concentrationary regime forced upon them, by torture, hunger, cold and isolation, a purely physical form of life, labouring each day to survive in circumstances that annihilated the very possibility of solidarity and spontaneity. The control exercised sadistically by the regime aimed to destroy the human in the living so as to render those it incarcerated into a horrifying kind of mere species beings who were not human beings, even as they struggled to hold onto a memory of that former state. Arendt thus represents a singular fold between the concepts of the political and aesthetic drawn from the stories and the actions of those who returned from this universe to testify to their endurance of harsh physical experience. They wanted to identify an event unforeseen and unprecedented in human history, but not with a genealogy or a future, that was, however, now to be grasped as a created possibility of the perpetually dark shadow on the very human condition that had become discernible in its negation. The question these returnees posed was even darker. What if this other space was not so other? What if what they had been vouchsafed to see in its extreme form was continuous with the everyday to which they returned with eyes unveiled by what they had seen as in fact one face of the modern project?

concluding remarks

| 239

Cultural Difference We are not inventing the concept. The coining was contemporary with release of political prisoners from the concentration camps of Germany and Austria in 1945. Acknowledging its currency, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan casually used it in 1949 as descriptor of the individual’s alienated experience of being instrumentalized in post-war society. Indeed, in its originating French formulations as l’univers concentrationnaire, the concept has a long life as a term in French literature and cultural thought (as the Introduction and Chapter 1 have shown). Our project, of which this book is part, involves the wider dissemination of an English neologism, the concentrationary, whose unfamiliarity perhaps reflects on the isolation of the landmasses of Britain and America from Occupied Europe. Certainly, British prisoners of war returned to Britain from incarceration in POW camps in countries occupied by Germany’s Third Reich and Japan during hostilities. But the British national experience included neither the camp as a widespread everyday presence outside many villages and towns (the case across greater Germany), nor the return of political deportees (resistance fighters) or surviving Jewish citizens to their former home countries. What did become a defining element of the latter for both British and American forces was, however, the traumatic encounter with the infamous German concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald or Dachau. Images of these camps labelled as evidence of ‘Nazi atrocities’ were disseminated by reports on the radio and presented in newsreels in cinema. In addition, and with distorting effects, post-liberation images of piles of abandoned corpses or skeletal men and women barely able to walk or hold out hands of gratitude to their Allied liberators became the icons in British culture precisely of what was not witnessed by British and American troops, or even the Soviet forces, and what was not shown on the news, namely the operation of mass murder in the six dedicated extermination camps. Placed in hidden sites on Polish soil, Bełżec, Treblinka and Sobibór had been closed down and mostly erased by late 1943, leaving one death factory at Auschwitz-Birkenau still functioning as such until October 1944. Chełmno was reactivated 23 June 1944–18 January 1945. The fleeing German forces mostly destroyed even this site so that only its ruins greeted the Russian troops in 1945 when they arrived at Oswieciem (Auschwitz) and their footage was not released until the 1990s. What we have to disentangle in the visual record and hence cultural memory, therefore, is the confusing overlay of the photographic and film evidence of the vast network of concentration camps in Germany operating between 1933 and 1945 liberated by Allied forces, with the verbal testimony and recovered archival documentary and often ruined material evidence of the industrial genocide directed against Jewish and Romani Europeans between 1941–44 and carried out in designated extermination camps outside Germany and only seen by Soviet troops. The price of the confusion is a lack of understanding of the uneffaced, structural, persistent, infection

240 | griselda pollock

of post-war society with the concentrationary that does not take the actual form of barbed wire enclosure (although it can and does exist in many forms in today’s society and very near to many of us). The concentrationary functions, therefore, as more than a different historical retrospect. It serves as a critical lens through which to discern a continuing assault on, and an insidious transformation of, the condition of our humanity that inhabits the normalcy of everyday life in current society. We aim to make visible a dimension of the historical-political memory of the twentieth century whose confusion has, however, precisely deprived us of critical tools necessary for the urgent defence of our own democracy, which is now threatened, but not by outright militarist state fascism as in the 1930s or the threat of mass racialized extermination. Rather, we witness do-it-yourself horrorism and subtler but equally menacing erosions in our political processes to which I will finally return.

Cultural Refractions For this reason we distinguished two further sub-concepts: concentrationary memories and concentrationary imaginaries. The first expands the field of memory studies allying itself with the urgency of Holocaust memory while drawing out a parallel field that does not coincide completely, but is not entirely separable in some key locations. The second addresses the dissemination of the concentrationary in and by popular culture where the powerful role of film, music, and the visual image circulate elements of this other universe, often normalizing its logics, while continually accommodating us to the acceptance of its often violent and violating premises under the rubric of entertainment. Both concentrationary memories and concentrationary imaginaries precipitate us into the necessity for a counterforce that we identify as the aesthetics of resistance. As much as it behoves us to track, trace and identify the passage of the concentrationary into daily life and into cultural forms, our purpose in proposing concentrationary memory is to agitate us and to make us vigilant against the normalization of the concentrationary logic. In the terms of Hannah Arendt, this requires action to sustain the political space where speaking to each other in ways that sustain creative human plurality enables us to act together in the production of freedom. In fostering this understanding of the political as the space of speech and action, hence of thought and affect, we, like Arendt, identified a critical role for the aesthetic. This term is preferred over the cultural as we wish to reinstate a certain moment of post-war critical theory in which theorists paid heightened attention to transformative practices at the cutting edge of experimental literary, cinematic, musical and artistic practices. Neither in the name of an alienating vanguardism, nor even a fully Adornian anti-populism, such self-conscious aesthetic experimentation and creative intervention explore the production of political effects and politically alert subjectivities as a result of the processes internal to the formal work of text, image, sound, and screen.

concluding remarks

| 241

The Aesthetics of Resistance was the subtitle of our first edited collection that identified a Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2009). This publication offered a detailed, multifaceted study of one 32-minute film, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) made ten years after the end of World War II. To this film and its aesthetic politics, we have now returned with this fourth study, but with a new focus. If we have arrived back where we began, we now bring into view one of the key figures whose work had set the project in motion – the poet Jean Cayrol, who is perhaps, outside France, one of the least known of the quartet associated with Nuit et brouillard: Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Hanns Eisler and Jean Cayrol. As a Nacht und Nebel prisoner who survived the notoriously fearful Mauthausen complex, and the author of a collection of poems titled Nuit et brouillard, Cayrol was also the source of the words spoken over Resnais’s film precisely as the Lazarean voice speaking from within the universe the film reconstructed in its horrifying montage. Resnais had sought Cayrol out to create such a voice because of what Cayrol knew. He was not, however, the witness who testifies. Instead, he was the crafter of words. These would be the bearers of an incommunicable experience that might be seeded into the ordinary world’s consciousness only by an allusive or dreamlike poetics ending with the one moment of direct address of an ‘I’ to us all now, who are called upon to hear an endless cry. Our purpose here has thus been both to go back to the specificity of Cayrolian poetics in order to bring back into wider cultural recognition both Cayrol’s voice and the aesthetic import of the words he wrote for the film and in his own texts. These gave form to a consciousness of the concentrationary as an issue to be constantly confronted in the post-war world: in the now, and not as a past or buried horror. Burial is a key word because of Cayrol’s unique insistence on an unburied revenant. The writers in this collection have taken Cayrol’s legacy in several directions. The first is to deepen the appreciation of Cayrol’s place in post-war French literary culture by presenting translations of his key texts for the first time and setting them in the fascinating space that falls between the concentrationary literature created by returning writers, sometimes testimonial and at other times analytical, and the emergence of a major post-war form of fiction writing known in France as the Nouveau Roman. Bringing them together is more genealogical than linear or causal. The created conversation allows the specific aesthetic tendencies often hypostasised as formal or aesthetic devices to be re-read as the symptomatic sites of inscription of the concentrationary as both a cultural diagnosis and an aesthetic system of alerts. For readers who are not specialists in French literary or cultural history, the close readings of Cayrol’s texts and his contexts establish the specific historical and contemporary ground for the concentrationnaire as an influential force in French post-war culture that is not always acknowledged, even while its locations, the study of the everyday and new forms of fiction are the acknowledged innovations. It also, however, makes clear what is distinctive in Cayrol’s place in this wider phenomenon. The epigraph from Patrick ffrench’s chapter I have used to introduce these conclud-

242 | griselda pollock

ing remarks identifies Cayrol’s key figure of the Lazarean. What has been distinctive in this volume has, therefore, been the analysis of this challenging figure in terms of culture, popular music, cinema and sound art. Why is concentrationary art Lazarean? To return from immediate encounter with the concentrationary universe is to carry an exceptional experience back home, where it could be witnessed, narrated in political study, or used as a source for fiction. If, however, the returnee is Lazarean, the space from which s/he has come back into the everyday world is not just an ‘over there’ or an ‘elsewhere’. It is a non-human – or no-longer-human-yet-humanlysensate – condition that is formed in the contradiction of having encountered the tomb world of the humanly dead while still living. Thus ‘returning’ is a perpetually compromised living we might name the negative shadow that haunts Arendt’s ‘human condition’. It is perhaps better understood as its uncanny and constant double. Cayrol’s investment in the figure of Lazarus clearly troubles the confused field in which the survivor-witness has largely been heard in terms of testimony to Holocaust suffering, hence the suffering of the Jewish or Romani communities of Europe with the few survivors of this mass murder. Once we disentangle the concentrationary and the exterminatory (although, through selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jewish survivors had become the enslaved inhabitants of the concentrationary universe of destruction through labour), and once we establish the wider field of debate in France to which Cayrol’s figure belongs, the Lazarean becomes a precise, but not purely localized, figure for the delineation of not only concentrationary memory but specifically concentrationary aesthetics. Hence many of the chapters of this book have been explorations of its fertility and its difficulty. What we feel we have shown is the manner in which the Lazarean becomes a second lens through which to look again at sometimes familiar cultural forms, such as the classic film of new feminist cinema in the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by Chantal Akerman and the recent film of a French cinema that engages with the current conditions of labour in the neoliberal economy, Ressources Humaines (Laurent Cantet, 1999). The Lazarean then wanders beyond Francophone culture into music and contemporary art in the studies of Australian singer Nick Cave and Scottish sound artist Susan Philipsz. These chapters explore how a Christian literary figure such as the biblical Lazarus can found a modern trope extended to the sonic and the lyric, not as further evidence of concentrationary persistence or seepage, but rather in relation to aesthetic forms and processes that incite a vigilance, which is beyond both fiction and testimony. The collection thus curves back in its final chapter once more to Cayrol and the film for which he scripted the voiced poetic commentary. Nuit et brouillard, but this time to build the bridge between 1955 and 2015 by means of the composer of the film’s score, Hanns Eisler. The contemporary sound art installation of Susan Philipsz has no narrative connection to Resnais’s 1955 work. It forges a temporary acoustic resonance across time and space in a manner that precisely catches up the threads

concluding remarks

| 243

of temporal and spatial disturbances identified by Silverman and ffrench as key elements of Cayrolian theory and fiction. Philipsz made her work without knowledge of Cayrol’s political aesthetics and without knowledge of Silverman and Pollock’s focus on Night and Fog as concentrationary cinema. The convergence, however, has engendered a theoretical and analytical encounter through the art historical study of contemporary sonic art and Philipsz’s longer project of sonic memory work. The acoustic dimension of sound raises a question of listening, what is theorized by John Mowitt as the audit, the form of encounter that makes of the participant in the sound art installation a resonating body as well as responding subjectivity. By means of the idea of the audit, the Lazarean thread is plaited to enable a dialogue with Elie Wiesel, perhaps one of the most renowned of witness-writers and activists of Jewish Holocaust memory. As a result of various factors – the late German assault in 1944 on the Jewish communities in Hungary, Wiesel’s young age at the time of capture and transportation, his selection for slave labour on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and his survival until the winter of 1944–45 – the teenager Eliezer Wiesel was death-marched from Auschwitz to a German concentration camp at Buchenwald in January 1945 and was liberated there some months later along with the few Jewish survivors of the slave labour camps on Polish soil still operating as the war was being lost by Germany. In his first book, Night (1954/58), a founding text of Jewish Holocaust literature, Wiesel delivers an instance of an audit, when his dying self listens to a violinist playing Beethoven with the last remnants of energy of his exhausted body. The described scene is Arendtian – the evocation of a moment of unpredictable, spontaneous and creative action invoking its own imagined political community of listeners, of which Eliezer Wiesel is the only, and only temporarily, conscious member. Yet the sound, the player and the listener remained impressed into Wiesel’s literary text to be then impressed on our memories precisely through the form of its aesthetic inscription. By what was felt and witnessed in that moment of shared near-death, Wiesel was imprinted with both the musical sound and the dying of one musician. As a result of the sonic event, Beethoven’s violin concerto, heard again in the future that this teenager lived to endure, throws forward that death space down the fragile waves of sound to any present occasion when the rousing orchestra or the lonely violin repeats Beethoven’s violin concerto to Wiesel or his readers. Time and space are once again invaded and twisted.

The Concentrationary Now As we finish the book, we look around and hear renewed anxiety about what is happening to our political humanity in a world of an intensified division and now dominated by what political theorist Wendy Brown defines as neoliberal rationality that can be summarised as the marketization of all our activities, including education and scholarship.3 Neoliberalism is a reconfiguration of economy and state exclusively in the interests of the economy. But it is more. Brown calls it a normative reason that

244 | griselda pollock

‘transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour along with humans themselves according to a specific image of the economic’ rendering all conduct ‘economic’.4 In terms that clearly echo but update Hannah Arendt’s anxiety expressed in The Human Condition that the political sphere is persistently eroded in modern societies by its becoming mere instrument and servant of the economy, Brown declares that what has followed the historic moment of 1989 that apparently ended the long rule of Soviet totalitarianism across Eastern Europe is the cauterization of democracy itself: In a century heavy with political ironies, there may have been none greater than this: at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream pundits hailed democracy’s global triumph, a new form of governmental reason was being unleashed in the Euro-Atlantic world that would inaugurate democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment. Within thirty years, Western democracy would grow gaunt, ghostly, its future increasingly hedged and improbable.5 Has democracy become Lazarean itself? The 2016 presidential election in the United States of America has already been considered a watershed in this process. It is not surprising in the days following the inauguration of Donald Trump as president on 29 January 2017, the sales of the very text upon which we founded our work in 2007, namely Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism first published in 1951, sky-rocketed. Rapidly out of stock on Amazon, this book was being sought as a potential guide to the very palpable feeling of political danger.6 In a thoughtful article published in December 2016 in the London Review of Books, political theorist David Runciman carefully used historical reflection on the 1920s and 1930s to examine the question on everyone’s mind: ‘Is this how democracy ends?’ Is the USA a failed state? They want to know what happens when authoritarians win elections and democracy morphs into something else. The demagogue who promised to kill terrorists along with their families is moving his own family into the presidential palace. Even before he has taken up occupation his children are being seeded into positions of power. There he is on television, shiny and golden, his wife beside him and three of his children lined up behind, ready to take up what daddy has to offer. Here he is back on Twitter, unshackled by victory, rounding on his opponents in the free press. His tenyear-old son is still too young to join in, but he was by his father’s side on election night, looking hardly less bemused than the rest of us, as Trump delivered his notably conciliatory victory speech. Words of conciliation followed by the ruthless personal appropriation of the machinery of government, children in tow. Isn’t this how democracy ends?7 Having precisely reviewed the histories of authoritarian revolutions during the twentieth century, Runciman concludes that we must not immediately compare events

concluding remarks

| 245

in Europe (Brexit and populist movements) and Trump’s election with the historical past, but we must be anxious because of what we know and what is new: Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the longterm threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.8 Early in 2018, political journalists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a bestseller, How Democracies Die.9 They argue that the slippage from democracy to dictatorship is not happening today through military coups, martial law or suspended constitutions. It is happening through the principal instrument that once ensured democracy: the ballot box. The imperceptible but dangerous erosion of the democratic is happening, according to these authors, through the processes that reverse the underlying safeguards of democratic political space. The symptoms include increasing unmediated polarization of political parties, the deepening financial instrumentalization of the political parties by powerful and narrow economic interests, and intentional aggravation of existing divisions, conflicts and inequalities. These amount to the erosion of what they name the ‘guard rails’ of a democratic system, the independence of the judiciary, the critical responsibility and freedom of a reliable press, and the mutual acceptance of and respect for the legitimacy of the opposition’s political and other opinions. These form procedural processes that are being replaced by a vicious antagonism between opposing parties seeking at any cost to ensure their own control of, or access to, power. This involves de-legitimation of opposing versions of reality as untrue as opposed to differently conceived political options. The authors argue that we have seen and know well overthrows by coups and wars and forced regime change. Democracy is dying by stealth today, they say, even though the apparent institutions of democracy, elections, the courts, the free press, if not acting in egalitarian and respectful forbearance of difference, are all in place: The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.10

246 | griselda pollock

Reading these books and articles, heavy with anxious warnings about real and present dangers to democracies, those of us involved in the historical study of the concentrationary through the prism of Arendt’s post-war political theses and the study of continuing political as well as cultural dissemination of the concentrationary plague, constantly scan current cultural forms for the role of the concentrationary imaginary in fostering and normalizing this destruction of democracy from within. Popular culture also surprises and at times is the site of shifting alerts. For instance, I followed the popular North American TV drama, Homeland, through to the conclusion of its seventh series in spring 2018 with the episode ‘Paean to the People’. How unexpected was it to find an almost Arendtian political analysis of the current process of the erosion of the political and the democratic? In the final episode, the president of the United States, Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) has survived an assassination attempt in a failed domestic coup engineered inside the security services (series 6), a Russian plot to compromise the Presidency, and the subsequent invocation of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution that provides for the forceful removal of an incumbent as unfit for presidential office. Keane is, however, reinstated when her brave CIA agents expose the Russian plot. At this point, however, her Vice President (Beau Bridges) advises her against continuing with her plans for radical cleaning-out of her enemies by executive order. He argues against the autocratic use of executive power because it can only exacerbate the vicious polarization in the country. Instead he calls upon her to develop a bipartisan process of political healing by means of the legislature as debating chamber. As a result of this exchange, Keane makes an unexpected decision. She goes on television in a formal address to the nation. The scene thus also invokes the imagined nation as audience, watching the television series. She declares that she is standing down forthwith in favour of the old-style democrat/Democrat vice president. The words the scriptwriters give to this president – the first ever to be a woman (and in TV fictions only the second in its history) – appear to draw their lesson from the recent diagnoses of what is destroying democracies, as, for example, in Runciman’s How Democracies Die. The vice president has advocated a return to the respectful articulation of political difference by using constitutional systems, instead of the removal of opponents through the use of executive power. Thus, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt conclude: Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended – by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.

concluding remarks

| 247

This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and ‘weaponizing’ the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.11 Alec Gansa’s Homeland: 7 (Showtime, USA 2018) bonded political theory and fictional writing for popular entertainment to take on as its very material of this political drama, set this time in Washington, DC, and inside the White House itself, the real events following the 2016 election and its shockwaves, even as it worked on the premise of a woman and a Democrat having won the presidency. I found myself reflecting once again on the intricate relations between the potential for a critical alliance between popular culture, creative art (in this case dramatic writing and performance) and political theory. Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us that: Protecting [our] democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs – and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown. History doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.12 The contribution of the Concentrationary Memories project, and notably with this final book on Concentrationary Art, is to have moved between the egregious moment of the fascist and totalitarian assault on democracy in the mid-twentieth century and our moment, when we desperately need analytical instruments through which to decipher rhymes that are not repeats. The differences matter as historical conditions have altered. On the one hand, current threats arise from the structural intimacy between the concentrationary and the new histories we are living. On the other hand, however, there is evidence of critical, imaginative and sometimes pointedly and self-consciously aesthetic and cultural interventions aiming to shift our responses to those new histories from dangerous reactions and towards defences and, indeed, extensions of the democratic ideals. The aesthetic does not represent the political or mime it. Its specificity is to address us as affected as well as thoughtful subjects, calling for attentive looking, listening and critical remembering that will serve to sharpen our vision and strengthen the resolve to salvage the project of democracy and, ultimately, to deliver its unrealized promise.13 If the concentrationary is, in the twentieth century, the crime of attempting to destroy plurality and spontaneity (the capacity for action and the new), it enacted it

248 | griselda pollock

through an extremity of polarization and divisiveness in the name of one right way and one race and ultimately one man, the leader alone. Even well into the twenty-first century our world is riven with radical racialized difference. Millions of people suffer from a global inequality that does not ensure even basic liveable human conditions. Millions are also having life conditions eroded by economically driven planetary despoliation and delayed action to climate change. We are being warned by history and by the new assaults on human living of the present. The concentrationary is the uncanny double of the political dream of democracy as a condition. That condition, human because it is political and political because it is human, is not to be confused with the economically imprisoned political establishments in which people have rightly lost faith, whether it is called ‘too much government’ or EU bureaucracy. The instrument for dealing with a created superfluity of humanity produced by the narrowed economic totalitarianism of neoliberal capitalism that is disembowelling our democracies is once again ‘the camp’ – detention centres, refugee camps, whole societies condemned to paramilitary factional occupation, our societies accepting horroristic events on our streets as the new normality of unhealed alienation endlessly inflamed by annihilatory rhetoric. Thus, ‘the camp’ can take many forms, as Jean Cayrol warned us. We need to hear Cayrol’s words from Nuit et brouillard once again as they speak not from his entombed past but to our present and its potential future if we do not listen: There are those reluctant to believe Or believing from time to time. There are those who look at these ruins today As though the old concentrationary monster were dead and buried beneath the rubble. Those who take hope again as the image fades As though there were a cure for the concentrationary plague Those who pretend all this happened only once, At a certain time and in a certain place. Those who refuse to look around them, Deaf to the endless cry.14

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds. Reputed as an international, postcolonial, queer, feminist analyst of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she has recently been writing on trauma and the aesthetic in modern and contemporary art and film, drawing on Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula, and on the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism. Her related publications include After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Fem-

concluding remarks

| 249

inist Museum (Manchester, 2013); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum and Wild Pansy Press, 2013); Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2014); Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (with Max Silverman, I B Tauris, 2015); and the monograph, Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018), a study of the single monumental artwork, Life? or Theatre?, of a German-Jewish artist murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

H. Arendt, The Human Condition [1958], Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 7. Arendt: The Human Condition, 8. W. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books, 2015. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 9. A. Griswold, ‘“The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt’s Defining Work on Tyranny is Out of Stock on Amazon.’ Quartz (29 January 2017), https://qz.com/897517/the-origins-oftotalitarianism-hannah-arendts-defining-work-on-tyranny-is-out-of-stock-on-amazon/; Williams, Z. ‘Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt.’ The Guardian (1 December 2017). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lesso ns-from-hannah-arendt-protests D. Runciman, ‘Is This How Democracy Ends?’ London Review of Books, 38:23 (1 December, 2016), 1 of 5, www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy... Runciman, ‘Is This How Democracy Ends?’, 5 of 5. S. Levitsky and D. Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018). Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 9–10. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 11. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 12. I am referring to theorists such as Jacques Rancière, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe who identify the dynamic processes within democracy as a still unrealized project. In this process, political work constantly generates and then overcomes agonistic conflicts that emerge precisely from each progressive step towards the realization of democracy. See J. Rancière, La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995); Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999); C. Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); B. Honig, ‘Toward Agonistic Feminism: Arendt and the Politics of Identity’, in B. Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt ( University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). The original French text of Nuit et brouillard (Argos Films, Dir. Alain Resnais, 1955): ‘Il y a nous qui regardons sincèrement ces ruines comme si le vieux monstre concentrationnaire était mort sous les décombres, qui feignons de reprendre espoir devant cette image qui s’éloigne, comme si on guérissait de la peste concentrationnaire, nous qui feignons de croire que tout cela est d’un seul temps et d’un seul pays, et qui ne pensons pas à regarder autour de nous et qui n’entendons pas qu’on crie sans fin.’

Bibliography Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951], Second Edition. New York: A Harvest Book at Harcourt Inc., 1985. ———. The Human Condition [1958]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Brown, W. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

250 | griselda pollock

Griswold, A. ‘“The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt’s Defining Work on Tyranny is Out of Stock on Amazon.’ Quartz (29 January 2017). https://qz.com/897517/the-origins-of-totalitarian ism-hannah-arendts-defining-work-on-tyranny-is-out-of-stock-on-amazon/. Levitsky, S. and D. Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018. Honig, B. ‘Toward Agonistic Feminism: Arendt and the Politics of Identity’, in B. Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park, PA; Penn State University Press, 1995, 135–66. Mouffe, C. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013. Rancière, J. La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995; Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999. Runciman, D. ‘Is This How Democracy Ends?’ London Review of Books, 38:23 (1 December, 2016), 1–5. www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy... Williams, Z. ‘Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt.’ The Guardian (1 December 2017). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-tru mp-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests.

Index

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, 182–83 abjection, 29, 61, 106, 112, 176, 218 absurd, the, 10, 35, 37, 49, 54, 65, 66, 71, 73, 76–77, 80, 83–85, 125 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 19, 177, 196, 198–99, 204, 218, 223–26 Composing for the Films, 198, 225 ‘The Problem of Suffering’, 196, 223 aesthetics of resistance, 93, 193, 240–41 ‘after Auschwitz’, 105, 177, 199, 204, 223, 226 Agamben, Giorgio, 16, 67–68, 78, 148, 174, 185 ‘bare life’, 78, 139, 175 Akerman, Chantal, 18, 123–24, 128–40, 242 Algerian War of Independence, 11, 15, 137 Allen, Michael Thad, The Business of Genocide, 114 Améry, Jean, 108 Ancerl, Karel, 206 Antelme, Robert, 8, 50, 75 L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race), 68–69, 78, 110, 127–28, 149–50 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 44, 123 Arendt, Hannah, 93, 96–97, 114, 116, 130, 177, 217, 227, 235–38, 240, 246, 248 ‘The Concentration Camps’, 67, 177–78 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 146–47, 149 The Human Condition, 235, 237, 242–44 Origins of Totalitarianism, 15, 173, 237, 244 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, 173 audit, the, 194–5

auditors, 206, 219, 226–27 auditory, 19, 191, 193–94, 198, 202, 206, 208, 210, 219, 226–27 autonomy for the auditory, 19, 191, 194, 198, 227 Bad Seeds, 172, 181 Balzac, Honoré de, 44, 50, 75 Barthes, Roland, 2, 7, 12, 16–17, 66, 69–70, 72, 75–86, 123 ‘Cayrol and Erasure’, 10–11, 13, 65–67, 85–86 ‘Jean Cayrol and his Novels’, 77–79, 81–83 Mythologies, 16 ‘The Object World’, 79–81 ‘Objective Literature’, 79–81 ‘Pre-Novels’, 84 ‘Reflections on the Style of The Outsider’, 83–84 ‘Un prolongement à la littérature de l’absurde’, 77 Writing Degree Zero, 10, 13, 76 bass clarinet, 192, 198, 210, 214 Basuyaux, Marie-Laure, 1, 8, 11–12, 15, 98, 127 Bataille, Georges, 37, 70–71, 86 Le bleu du ciel (The Blue of Noon), 70 L’expérience littéraire (Inner Experience), 69 Baudelaire, Charles, 123, 131–32, 140 ‘The Enemy’, 131–32, 138 ‘Invitation to the Voyage’, 33, 73 Baudrillard, Jean, 15–16, 126 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 80, 85 Bauman, Zygmunt, 174 Beauvoir, Simone de, 126 Beckett, Samuel, 17, 80–81, 109

252 | index

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 20, 201–202, 226, 243 Beethoven violin concerto (D major, Op. 61, 1806), 201 Béguin, Albert, 77 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 123, 177, 215–16 Bernstein, Leonard, 196 Bertrand, Marc, 9 Bethany, 69, 99 biopolitics, 175, 186 black sites, 173 Blanchot, Maurice, 2, 10, 17, 70, 77, 81, 84, 98, 123, 138 ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, 70 The Writing of the Disaster, 66, 69 Bode, Arnold, 203–204 body, the, 18–20, 31, 35–36, 40–41, 45, 47, 49, 54, 56, 73, 78, 93–94, 97, 102, 105–106, 112, 124, 129–31, 133–34, 139, 163, 166, 175, 195, 201, 206, 208–209, 213–14, 219–20, 226–27, 243. See also cadaver Boudet, Claude, 15 Bouquet, Michel, 106, 195 Bourke-White, Margaret, 107 Boutang, Yann Moulier, 151 Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 132, 195–96 Brown, Wendy, 243–44 Undoing the Demos, 243 Butler, Judith, 147, 152, 157, 166 Butor, Michel, 12 cadaver, 53, 70, 72–74 Camus, Albert, 10, 17, 52, 54, 66, 75–77, 82, 146, 163 The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe), 163 The Outsider (L’Étranger), 76, 84 The Plague (La Peste), 83 Cantet, Laurent, 18, 145–46, 154, 156, 158–64, 242 capitalism, 1, 4–5, 15–16, 49, 113–14, 125, 129, 131, 133, 135–36, 139, 146–51, 155–56, 163, 166, 248 capitalist, 16, 94, 112, 114–15, 124, 126– 27, 146, 148, 150–52, 155, 165–66, 174, 177, 238

Castoriadis, Cornelius, 15–16 cataclysm, 78–80, 82 Catherine of Siena, 71 Cave, Nick, 19, 172, 181–83, 185, 242 cave, the, 30, 42, 102–103 Cayrol, Jean, 1–2, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103–105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 146, 149, 153–54, 191, 192–93, 195–99, 164, 217–19, 224 and Christianity, 8 and concentrationary art, 1–3, 5, 8–12, 14, 16–18, 51, 93–94, 98, 115, 124, 129, 145, 197, 242 (see also concentrationary art) L’Espace d’une nuit (The Space of a Night), 84 Je Vivrai l’amour des autres (I Will Live the Love of Others), 2, 68 Lazare parmi nous (Lazarus Among Us), 2–5, 8, 12, 16–17, 20, 29–62, 65, 125, 128–29, 135, 149, 154, 165 in Mauthausen, 1–4, 8, 95, 98, 105, 191 (see also concentration camps: Mauthausen-Gusen) Les Mots sont aussi des demeures (Words are also Lodgings), 84 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 2, 11, 65, 67, 126, 137, 186 (see also Resnais) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), 2–3, 11, 16, 19, 67, 95, 104, 106–108, 112–13, 126, 128, 135, 137, 166–7, 174, 182, 191–95, 197, 199, 203, 210, 215, 218, 224–5, 241–42, 248 ( also Resnais) On vous parle (Someone is Speaking to You), 2, 68 Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard (Poems of Night and Fog), 2, 95 Poetics, 224–25 Les Premiers jours (The First Days), 2, 68 Celan, Paul, 104–5, 217, 225 Todesfuge: Death Fugue, 217 Certeau, Michel de, 123 Chaplin, Charlie, 196, 209 The Circus, 209 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 81

| 253 charity, 72, 79, 82 Chasidic community, 109, 201 Chion, Michel, 208 Christian X, King of Denmark, 205 Christianity, 8, 72–73 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 204 cinéma-vérité, 18, 136, 147, 165–66 city, the, 7, 15, 18, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 135, 183–84, 204–206, 210, 220 clarinet, 192, 194, 197–8, 210, 213–14, 218 Combat, 76, 83 community, 18–20, 31, 41, 51–52, 62, 72, 80, 82, 97, 109, 157, 166, 196, 216–17, 237, 243 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 156, 163–64 concentration camps/extermination camps: Auschwitz (Oswieciem), 4, 12–13, 105, 109, 111, 113–14, 116, 194, 197–200, 203, 205–206, 223, 227, 239, 243, 249 Auschwitz II, Birkenau, 105, 108–9, 113–15, 197–98, 206, 224, 239, 242–3 Auschwitz III-Monowitz, 105, 108, 199, 200 Bełżec, 239 Bergen-Belson, 182, 197, 216, 239 Breitenau, 204 Buchenwald, 50, 53, 96, 105, 107, 109–10, 113–15, 194, 200, 203, 205, 220–23, 239, 243 Chelmno, 239 Dachau, 94, 174, 239 Fresnes, 2, 35, 40 Mauthausen-Gusen, 1–3, 8, 35, 45, 47, 50, 95, 98, 105, 191–92, 241 Ravensbruck, 68, 94, 111 Sobibór, 239 Terezin (Theresienstadt), 205–6 Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), 206 Theresienstadt: ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem Jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: a documentary film about the Jewish settlement), 206 Treblinka, 239

concentrationary, the, 1, 3–5, 8–12, 14–16, 18, 20, 30, 36, 38–39, 49, 56, 58–60, 65–68, 70, 72–77, 79, 81, 93, 97–98, 105–106, 108, 111–12, 114–15, 124– 25, 127, 137, 146–49, 151–52, 154, 157, 164–67, 172, 174–79, 182, 193, 217–20, 222, 225–226, 235–36, 238– 42, 246–47. See also concentrationary universe creep and seep, 174, 182–83, 242 concentrationary art, 1–3, 5, 8–14, 16–18, 20, 51, 76, 93–94, 98, 106, 112, 115, 124, 129, 137–38, 145–46, 149, 153–54, 158, 162, 164, 173, 197, 218, 235, 242, 247. See also Cayrol; Lazarean: literature/art Concentrationary Cinema, 1, 18–19, 112, 124, 128–29, 153–54, 165, 241, 243 concentrationary image, the, 19, 172, 174–75, 178–79, 187 amnesiac, 19, 172, 174–6, 178–80, 183, 186 citational, 19, 172, 174, 176, 178–9, 181, 183, 186 indexical, 19, 172, 174–6, 178–79, 181, 183, 186 Concentrationary Imaginaries, 1, 14, 174 concentrationary imaginary, 16, 174, 179, 240, 246 Concentrationary Memories, 1, 14, 17, 173, 178, 181, 235, 240, 247. See also memory concentrationary monster, the, 149, 197, 225, 248 concentrationary plague, the, 198, 225, 246, 248 concentrationary universe, the, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 62, 67, 71, 94–96, 98, 104–105, 108, 112–13, 115, 124–25, 146–49, 152, 165–66, 173–75, 178–79, 181, 220, 222, 226, 238, 242. See also Rousset: L’univers concentrationnaire Coquio, Catherine, 8, 12, 15 corpse, the, 6, 18, 97, 99, 105–106, 110–12, 114–16, 176, 197, 201–02, 213, 216, 219–20, 223, 226, 239 Critique, 85 Cross, the, 29, 44–46, 51, 59, 70–72

254 | index

culture, 2–3, 17, 124, 126, 150, 152–53, 156–57, 172–73, 182, 220, 227, 236, 239, 241–42 consumer, 128, 139–40 popular, 16, 172, 174, 240, 247 Daix, Pierre, 8 Dante, 34, 238 d’Astorg, Bernard, 68 death, 2–5, 7–8, 10, 17–18, 20, 30, 35–37, 44, 48–49, 55, 57–59, 61–62, 66–73, 75, 84, 93–100, 102–106, 108–12, 115–16, 124, 131, 134–39, 153, 175–77, 179–80, 182, 193, 200, 202, 204–205, 216–17, 219–20, 222, 224, 226, 239, 245 death march, 194, 199, 243 Debord, Guy, 15–16, 126 defamiliarization, 7, 125, 127, 131, 133, 135, 173, 177, 183 Dejours, Christophe, 146–49 dehumanization, 7, 15, 93, 94, 106, 108, 125, 149, 151, 175, 206, 213, 236 Delbo, Charlotte, 111–12 Days and Memory, 111 Deleuze, Gilles, 126 Déotte, Jean-Louis, 9, 126 Derrida, Jacques, 217 desire, 18, 30, 40, 43, 48, 56–58, 69–70, 126, 129, 131, 135–36, 148, 173, 178, 200, 223, 226, 245 detention centres (UK immigration), 173, 248 Dieu vivant, 68, 70, 72 Dig Lazarus Dig (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album and song), 172, 180, 182–83, 185–87 disaster, 8, 10, 62, 66–67, 204, 235 displacement, 17, 66–67, 74–75, 85, 173, 235 DOCUMENTA, 203–204 dOCUMENTA (13), 203–205 doubling/dédoublement, 5–6, 11–12, 39, 53, 61, 75, 78, 134, 140, 217 dreams, 5–6, 29, 33–48, 53, 56, 73–74, 77, 184 Dümling, Alexander, 219

Durand, Claude, 11, 154 Duras, Marguerite, 12 Duration, 77–79 Dylan, Bob, 181 Écrire, 2, 86 Eisler, Hanns, 19–20, 120, 191–203, 209–10, 214–26, 241–42 Composing for the Films, 120, 196, 198, 209 Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain, 209 Nuit et brouillard, 19, 191–92, 194, 195–99, 218, 224, 241–42 Prelude of a Passacaglia, 209 Septet No. 2, 209 Eliot, T.S., 29 Éluard, Paul, 36 Esprit, 2, 68–69, 77 everyday life/the everyday, 1, 4–7, 9–11, 13– 18, 34, 36, 39, 47, 49, 53, 57, 65, 73–74, 79–81, 93, 105–108, 114, 123–25, 127– 29, 133, 135–40, 146–47, 156, 164–65, 167, 173, 182–83, 209, 238, 240–42 evil, 29, 34, 42, 55, 70, 72, 82–83, 146–47, 196–97 fantastic, 50, 75 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 85 Ferrett, D., 183 FBI, 192, 209, 210 Flaubert, Gustave, 76 flute, 210, 216 forgetting, 5, 66, 86, 204, 223 Fortin, Jutta, 13 Foucault, Michel, 85, 175 Frankfurt School, 15, 196 freedom, 7, 33, 55, 115, 124–25, 128–29, 134, 140, 150–51, 153, 166, 180, 240, 245 friendship, 47, 54, 56, 60, 79, 154 Freud, Sigmund, 139, 180, 183 Gary, Romain, 13 genocide, 14, 97, 112–14, 174, 177, 239 ghosts, 13–14, 19, 131, 137–39, 175–76, 178–79, 244 Gilroy, Paul, 148

| 255 Gleiwitz, 200–201, 203 Godard, Jean-Luc, 15, 126, 128, 145, 147, 160, 165 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 96, 220 Gospel of John, 18, 98–99, 100, 105, 175, 178 Gospels, 99, 115, 180 Guattari, Félix, 126 Haas, Pavel, 205–207 Study for Strings, 205–207 Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, 209 Hangmen Also Die!, 196 haunting, 12, 19, 41, 61, 136, 172, 179, 182, 206, 227 Hirsch, Joshua, 136 Hirsch, Marianne, 137 history, 5, 8, 10, 12–14, 16, 19, 29–30, 50, 65, 78–80, 82–83, 86, 93, 97, 110, 134, 136, 149, 175–76, 179, 181, 192–93, 203–204, 207, 215, 223, 227, 235, 238, 241, 246–48 Hohenems, Jewish Community, Jewish Cemetery, 193, 210, 216–17, 220 Holloway, John, 151–52, 155 Hollywood, 196–97, 205, 218 Holocaust, the, 1, 3–4, 8, 14, 16, 18, 86, 97–98, 108, 110, 136–38, 174, 193–94, 204–06, 240, 242–43 Homeland, 7 246–47 Horn, Rebecca, 194, 220 Concert for Buchenwald, 220–24 Concert in Reverse, 220 horror, 6, 9, 11, 16, 37, 41, 52, 56, 94, 105–06, 110, 116, 127–28, 136–38, 140, 148, 174, 176, 178, 182, 195, 198–99, 202, 217, 219, 222, 224, 226, 240–41, 248 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 196, 209, 226 Huyssen, Andreas, 176 I G Farben, 105, 108, 114 image, 10–11, 19, 30, 33–37, 39–40, 46, 52, 57, 59, 61, 65, 74, 102, 105–08, 110–11, 115, 130, 139–40, 153, 159–63, 17287, 191–92, 194–200, 205,

213–14, 216–19, 222, 224–26, 239–40, 244, 248. See also concentrationary image imagination, 11, 36, 39, 51, 124, 178, 186, 193 impoverishment, 66, 78, 80–82, 135 Ivens, Joris, Regen, 209 Jarry, Alfred, Ubu Roi, 238 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 18, 123–40, 242 Jesus, 8, 69, 71, 98–99, 102, 178, 180–81 Jews, 4, 14, 18–19, 93, 97–99, 104–105, 108–10, 112–13, 115, 136, 193–94, 196, 198–206, 210, 216–17, 224–25, 239, 242–43 Joachim, Joseph, 202 John (Gospel). See Gospel of John Juliek, the violinist, 200–202, 220, 223, 226 Kafka, Franz, 81, 125 The Castle, 125 ‘Metamorphosis’, 81 ‘In the Penal Colony’, 10, 71 The Trial, 10 Kassel, 203–07 Kertész, Imre, 220 Kierkegaard, Sören, 180 Kogon, Eugen Der SS-Staat, 68 Kristeva, Julia, 176 Kuhle Wampe: To Whom Does the World Belong, 196 Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB), 192, 209–10, 214, 216–17, 220, 226 Kuon, Peter, 9 Lacan, Jacques, 14–15, 111, 114, 239 Lanzmann, Claude, 2, 174, 206 Last Post, the (Menin Gate, Ypres), 207 Lazarean, (the), 1, 4–9, 11–13, 16–20, 29–31, 33, 43, 49–62, 65–70, 72–77, 79–81, 83–86, 93–4, 104–06, 110–12, 115–16, 126, 131, 137–38, 172–73, 175–83, 185–87, 191, 193, 197, 199, 202, 210, 217–19, 223–25, 227, 235, 241–43. See also concentrationary, the image, 19, 172–87 (see also concentrationary image)

256 | index

literature/art, 1, 4, 7–9, 11–13, 16– 17, 19–20, 50–52, 54–62, 66–67, 69–70, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83–85, 111, 115, 126, 149, 183, 185–87, 197, 202, 218, 223, 235, 242 (see also concentrationary art) sound, 19, 191, 193, 217, 226 Lazarus, 1, 5, 8–10, 13–18, 29, 66, 68–70, 72, 73, 83–86, 93, 95, 97–103, 105– 106, 111, 115, 136–37, 140, 172–73, 175–83, 185–87, 194, 242 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 81, 123–27, 129, 138 Lefort, Claude, 15 Levi, Primo, 2, 8, 68, 105, 108–109, 112, 175, 179 Levitsky, Steven, 245–47 How Democracies Die, 246 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 15 liberation (of camps), 50, 66, 95, 110–11, 115, 136, 149, 174, 182, 197, 203, 239 Lindeperg, Sylvie, 113, 195, 197 look, the, 71, 83, 85, 111 Magny, Claude-Edmond, 68–70 Malgouzou, Yannick, 13–14 Marcuse, Herbert, 18, 145–48, 150, 152–53 Marker, Chris, 112, 165, 197, 224, 241 Marks, Laura, 134, 139 Martha, 69, 99. See also Mary Marx/Marxism, 7, 16, 76, 82, 124, 139, 146, 150–52, 196, 203 Mary, 69, 99, 102. See also Martha Mauriac, François, 68, 111 McCann, Graham, 225 McLuhan, Marshall, 186 memory, 6, 18, 30, 37, 48, 54, 61, 66, 80, 93, 97, 111, 129, 134–37, 174, 176, 193, 202, 206–207, 209–210, 222, 224, 235, 238, 240, 243 concentrationary, 11, 134, 137–38, 173, 176–77, 179, 204–05, 240, 242 cultural, 172, 239 Holocaust, 98, 108, 138, 205, 240, 243

Lazarean, 138, 176 palimpsestic, 11, 137 post-, 137 Mendelssohn, Felix, 202 mirror, 11, 51, 110–11, 116, 184, 224 mirror phase, 14 modernity, 15, 19, 81, 124, 133, 139, 147–49, 165, 174, 178–79, 182 Modiano, Patrick, 13 Mondzain, Marie-José, 158 Morin, Edgar, 166 Mosebach, Martin, 222 Mounier, Emmanuel, 29, 68 mourning, 136, 180, 210, 216, 235 Mowitt, John, 19, 194, 207, 209, 243 Sounds: The Ambient Humanities, 194 Muselmann, 68, 105, 112, 175–76 ‘Nature Boy’ (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song), 182 Nazism, 2, 147 neighbour, 72, 129, 130, 133 New Testament, 69, 180 Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), 2, 18, 43, 94–96, 192–93, 241 Night (Elie Wiesel), 18, 20, 99, 108–11, 115, 243 nouveau roman/new novel, 2, 12–13, 65–66, 79, 81, 85, 135, 138, 166, 241 objects, 7, 12–13, 17–18, 39, 50, 61–62, 66, 75, 78, 79–81, 83, 85, 124, 129, 131, 134–39, 152–53, 208, 223 Odysseus, 98 Orpheus, 98, 106, 182 Orphic gaze, 105 Orwell, George, 1984 173 O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 146–47, 155, 159, 164–65 Oster, Daniel, 1, 126 Parain, Brice, 69 Parataxis, 182 Parrau, Alain, 14 Pateau, Michel, 1 Paulhan, Jean, 69 Perec, Georges, 13, 123, 126–28

| 257 Philipsz, Susan, 19–20, 191–99, 203 Night and Fog, 192–232 War Damaged Musical Instruments, 207 Part File Score, 209 Study for Strings, 205 Picasso, Pablo, 10, 50 Pleynet, Marcelin, 2, 13, 86 Ponge, Francis, 17, 80 Le parti-pris des choses, 80 poverty, 52, 82, 175 Pozner, Ida, 226 Premat, Christophe, 15 Prévost, Abbé, 10, 52 Proust, Marcel, 84–85, 135 A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), 84 Queneau, Raymond, 10 Rancière, Jacques, 182 reason/rationality, 125, 153, 127–28, 135, 139, 145, 153, 243 Red Army, 194, 199 Red River Shore (Bob Dylan Song), 181 Rembrandt, 18, 99–102, 104–05 Resnais, Alain, 2, 11, 18, 19, 67, 95, 103–105, 107–108, 112–115, 126, 137, 165–66, 173–74, 191–97, 203, 210, 214–17, 219, 224–6, 241–42 Hiroshima mon amour, 11, 137 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 2, 11, 65, 67, 126, 137, 186 Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog, 2, 19, 67, 95, 104–106, 108, 112–15, 137, 166, 173–74, 191–95, 197, 199, 203, 210, 215, 218, 224–25, 241–42 Les Statues Meurent Aussi, 113 Van Gogh, 103–105 resurrection, 8, 17, 68–69, 93, 98–99, 102, 104, 106, 111–12, 178, 181, 206, 219 return, 5, 9, 14, 18–19, 34, 37, 39, 43–49, 51, 55–56, 58–59, 62, 67–69, 73–75, 82, 84, 86, 93–95, 97–99, 102, 106–107, 109, 111–15, 131, 136–38, 153–55, 173, 175–76, 178–80, 186, 193, 206, 235–36, 238–39, 241–42

revenant, 2, 13, 20, 98, 111, 219, 225, 227, 241 Rheingold, Das (Wagner), 96 Rimbaud, Arthur, 44, 46 Rivette, Jacques, 160 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 12, 17, 79–81, 84–85, 135, 138 The Erasers (Les Gommes), 84 Towards a New Novel (Pour un nouveau roman), 12 Romani/Roma/Romani Europeans, 112, 225, 239, 242 Ross, Kristin, 16 Rouch, Jean, 136–37, 165 Rousset, David, 1, 4–5, 8, 15, 20, 50, 67–68, 70–72, 75, 93–94, 96, 112, 124–25, 127, 146–47, 149, 151–52, 165, 173, 177, 179, 220 Lazare ressuscité (Lazarus Resuscitated), 68 Les jours de notre mort (The Days of our Death), 67, 93 Le pitre qui ne rit pas (The Clown Who Did Not Laugh), 68 L’univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), 1, 4, 67, 71, 96, 124, 149, 173, 220 Runciman, David, 244, 246 Ruttmann, Walter, Lichtspiel: Opus III, 209 Sade, Marquis de, 52 Salgas, Jean-Pierre, 8, 11, 128 salvation, 6, 34, 43–44, 50, 72, 98, 222–24 Sarraute, Nathalie, 13 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 76, 186, 223 Le sursis (The Reprieve), 76 Schädler, Linda, 208 Schoenberg, Arnold, 20, 196, 198–99, 209, 226 The Survivor of Warsaw, 199 Schmid, Marion, 136–37 Schwarz-Bart, André, 8 Scorsese, Martin, Shutter Island, 174 Sebald, W.G., 13 Semprun, Jorge, 13, 220 Seyrig, Delphine, 129, 136–37

258 | index

Shelley, Mary, 183 Frankenstein, 183 The Last Man, 183 Sheringham, Michael, 124, 127 Shoah, 97, 109, 206 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann), 174, 206 Simon, Claude, 12–13 Situationists, 126, 146, 152 solidarity, 71, 82–83, 238 solitude, 7, 30, 35, 43, 48, 54–55, 58, 60–61, 75, 84, 185 Sollers, Philippe, 2, 80, 85–86 Sonderkommando, 94 sound studies, 194 Sounds: The Ambient Humanities, 194 space, 7, 11–12, 14–16, 18–19, 50, 66–67, 69, 79–81, 83–85, 94, 105, 110–11, 123–24, 126–36, 138–40, 147, 150, 152, 154–58, 160–63, 166–67, 174, 177, 179, 184, 192–93, 201, 203, 205– 206, 208–10, 220, 226–27, 236–38, 240–43, 245, 249 spectres/spectrality, 9, 13, 113, 138, 183, 220 Stendhal, 10, 50, 60, 75–76 Stevens, George, 174 Stravinsky, Igor, 196 Surrealism, 12, 123–24 survival, 43, 68, 73–74, 77, 79, 97, 112, 128, 150, 243 Tate Britain, 217 technology, 94, 146–47, 152–53, 161, 163, 173 Tel Quel, 2, 80, 85–86 Temps modernes, Les, 2 Tennant Jackson, Jenny, 215 terror, 6, 38, 47, 49, 53, 81, 94, 96, 115, 131, 149, 173, 176, 178, 182, 204, 226, 238, 244 testimony, 8–9, 11–13, 52, 66, 71, 76, 108–110, 127, 149, 218, 224, 236, 239, 242 Third Reich, 3–4, 108, 191, 193, 201, 203–05, 216, 220, 225, 237–39 Tillion, Germaine, 68

time, 10–12, 17, 29, 34, 39, 41, 51, 55–56, 61, 66–68, 73, 75–83, 85–86, 106, 129–33, 135–37, 139, 151, 163, 175–76, 178, 201–202, 208, 220, 224, 235, 242–43, 248 Trauerspiel, 215–16. See also Benjamin, Walter tomb, 30, 53, 69–70, 93–94, 103, 105, 110–11, 179–80, 184, 193, 202 camp-tomb, 225 cave-tomb, 102 tomb-corpse-face, 115 tomb-world, 94, 98–99, 106, 108, 115–16, 217, 242 totalitarian, 9, 15, 93, 96–97, 108, 112, 114, 147–48, 150, 153, 177, 180, 197, 216, 226, 236–37, 244, 247–48 traces, 5, 13–14, 29, 47, 59, 113, 135, 178, 205, 208, 224, 226 trauma, 8, 124, 131, 135–38, 172, 178, 185, 193, 204, 216, 226, 235, 239 Trummer, Thomas, 19, 194, 198–99 autonomy for the auditory, 19 uncanny, 5, 13, 72, 99, 125, 133–34, 137, 139, 176, 179–80, 183, 187, 242, 248 Van Gogh, Vincent, 18, 102, 103–05 Vaneigem, Raoul, 126, 146 Varda, Agnès, 165 Vercors, 71–72 The Silence of the Sea (Le silence de la mer), 71 The Weapons of the Night (Les armes de la nuit), 72 Vernichtung durch Arbeit (Annihilation through labour), 194 violin, 19–20, 192, 194, 198–202, 210, 213, 220, 222–23, 226 Virilio, Paul, 177 Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse 5, 183 Vray, Jean-Bernard, 13 Wannsee Protocol, 106 Weil, Simone, 70 Weimar, 200, 220–23

| 259 Wiesel, Elie (Eleazar), 2, 18, 20, 98–99, 108–12, 115–16, 194, 199–200, 202, 213, 220, 223–24, 229, 243 Night, 20, 99, 109–10, 194, 199, 213, 223 Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), 109 witness, 11, 14, 29, 49, 53–54, 62, 67, 69, 72–73, 76, 79–80, 95, 108–10, 112–13, 149, 174, 176–84, 186–87, 192, 195–97, 226, 239–43

Wormser, Olga, 226 Yacine, Kateb, 2 Yemen, 173 Yiddish, 108–09, 194 zero degree, 11, 13, 17, 72, 76 Ziblatt, Daniel, 245 How Democracies Die, 245–46 zombie, 19, 132, 176, 178