Hannah Arendt on Radical Evil

In a letter to Karl Jaspers, dated March 4, 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote the following on “radical evil”:

What radical evil is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as a means to an end, which leaves their essences as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability- which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity- is eliminated. And all this in turn arises from- or, better, goes along with- the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply of the lust for power) of an individual man. If an individual man qua man were omnipotent, then there is in fact no reason why men in the plural should exist at all – just as in monotheism it is only God’s omnipotence that makes him ONE. So, in this same way, the omnipotence of an individual man would make men superfluous (Kohler, Lotte and Hans Saner, Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969, #109, 166.)

For Arendt, what makes human beings superfluous is the consolidation of power in a single omnipotent individual- or, better, an ideology articulated by an individual or group.  This consolidation of power creates a “delusion of omnipotence” that  prohibits the emergence of new beginnings precisely because nothing can emerge that is not already known by the omnipotent individual or accounted for by the ideology. This delusion of omnipotence eliminates the the unique manifestation of power that every human being possesses by nature of their birth – the capacity for novelty. Following Augustine, who wrote in The City of God that when a person is born “something new comes about in time”, Arendt viewed natality (the “new beginning” inherent in birth) to be the central category of the human condition (Augustine, The City of God, trans. R.W. Dyson, Book XII.21, 516; Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 8-9). The birth of a human being is the advent of a something new. To block this creative genesis in the individual is tantamount to making them superfluous.

Each human being possesses a potentiality that exhibits itself in unique and previously unknown talents that are developed through the institutional structures of a society and contribute not only to the local community but also to humanity as a whole. However, this potentiality – or better, this dynamism - is also unpredictable and therefore involves an inherent threat or danger to the established structure. Possibility threatens reality with change and calls into question every hegemony – every delusion of omnipotence. It is this danger that ideologies seek eliminate in human beings by providing an unquestionable account of the whole. Natality, the central category of the human condition, is eliminated whenever the possible is rendered inoperative by the omnipotence of certainty. This destruction of the possible eliminates the new beginnings that every unique human being possesses by the fact of their birth.  When human beings are made superfluous through disenfranchisement or marginalization they lose the opportunity to develop their talents in concert with others within the society in which they are embedded and consequently their ability to contribute to humanity as a whole. One has only to consider the countless contributions that were rendered inoperative in the camps of Nazi Germany, the fields of Cambodia,  or the streets of Rwanda. And,lest we forget,  the plains of North America, the segregated streets of the American South, or a fence post in Wyoming. It is a short walk from superfluity to Auschwitz.

Inglourious Basterds: The Best (Not a) Shoah Movie of 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s recent film Inglourious Basterds is cinema embedded in cinema. The film takes multiple focuses but centers chiefly on a film theater in German-occupied Paris run by Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman living under an assumed identity after escaping the mass execution of her family. Shosanna is romantically pursued by a young German soldier named Frederick Zoller who had become a war hero after saving his unit through his expert marksmanship and who had subsequently become the subject of Nazi propaganda film. The young soldier, enamored with the young theater owner, convinces her to allow the premiere of the film about him to take place in her theater which Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler will attend. Although, Tarantino has been quick to point out that Inglorious Basterds is not a film about the Shoah but more of a “guys-on-a-mission movie” it is difficult to see how the film can escape representing the Shoah given the central role that Nazi ideology, propaganda, and state sanctioned violence against Jews plays (Horn, Jordana, “Glorious Bastard: Tarantino Talks About His Not-A-Holocaust-Movie,” The Jewish Daily Forward, August 21, 2009) Tarantino is his attempt not to represent the Shoah, has represented it. But how has he represented it?

Tarantino places “killing Nazis” at the center of his filmic discourse. Through the use of cinematic techniques such as montage and “breaking the fourth wall”, Tarantino blurs the lines between “killing Nazis” and “Nazis killing” in two central scenes. In the central scene of the movie where Hitler and his high command have gathered in Shosanna’s Paris theater to the view the premiere of the new propaganda film featuring Frederick Zoller, Tarantino takes a surrealistic turn and uses cinematic montage to turn the tables on the audience. While the doors of the theater are being locked, the building set ablaze, hidden explosives are ticking towards ignition, and the weapons of Tarantino’s Basterds are trained on Hitler’s high command, the Nazi propaganda film depicting similar acts by Nazi soldiers plays in the background. The cinematic frames alternate between the eruption of gunfire in the theater and in the propaganda film. The delight on the faces of Nazis in the propaganda film while they are killing and the delight on the faces of those killing Nazis in the theater becomes difficult to separate as the speed of the frames increases. The propaganda film then becomes the vengeful and mocking face of Shosanna reveling in the deaths of her persecutors.In the final scene of the movie Lt. Aldo Raine carves a swastika into the forehead of the captured SS Col. Hans Landa. While he works his grisly craft the camera focus shifts and breaks the fourth wall so that the audience perspective become the perspective of the Nazi. Tarantino catches the audience on the horns of these images in order to bring into relief the human taste for revenge and the natural proclivity for violence. In this way, the film serves as a surrealistic attempt to represent the un-representable. Instead of spelling out the horror of the Shoah in narrative discourse and images, Tarantino creates a cinematographic experience in which the audience is able to experience the sensuous phenomenon of hatred, revenge and violence that serve as visceral cues to the essence of the historical experience in a more acute way than narrative does. In the end, the hands of the audience and the hands of the Nazis look the same – bloody.

Why You Should Read Arendt Before Badiou

Alain Badiou’s essay “The Uses of the Word Jew“ is surprisingly popular and equally disturbing. While Badiou admits the return of a more banal and covert, but no less pernicious,  form of anti-Semitism due to a lowering of the threshold at which public opinion no longer tolerates this sort of racialist provocation (paragraph 2) he nonetheless, unwittingly (I assume), creates the conditions for the possibility of a more overt form of anti-Semitism.

In the essay, Badiou suggests the elimination of identity predicates such as “Jew,” “Arab,” “Palestinian,” “French,” “Muslim” etc. in political discourse.   The focus of the essay is specifically aimed at the use of the identity predicate “Jew”. Badiou asks if  in the general field of public intellectual discussion, the word “Jew” constitutes an exceptional signifier, such that it would be legitimate to make it play the role of a final, or even sacred signifier (paragraph 4). Badiou argues that  racial discrimination (anti-Semitism) and racial consciousness (philo-Semitism) are equal contributors to the problem of anti-Semitism and call for the same egalitarian and universalist reaction because both raise the identity predicate to a paradigmatic position that erroneously sacrilizes it so that it constitutes an exceptional signifier (paragraph 4). This shocking claim makes the exceptional use of the word Jew by Hitler in Mein Kampf and the use of the word Jew in Elie Wiesel in Night equally anti-Semitic.

Badiou’s chief claim is that the word Jew has achieved an unwarranted transcendent status as a result of the the Shoah which conferred upon the victims a sacred status. This status is rooted in what Badiou calls a victim ideology which he rejects because he does not accept that an atrocity confers a surplus value on a predicate (paragraph 9). In short, the victims of the Shoah and their descendants are of no more value than any other victim of an atrocity, or community in general. He argues that the use of identity predicates in public discourse disrupts the identitarian configuration of the cosmopolitan state (paragraph 11.) Applying his analysis to the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Badiou argues instead for a secular and democratic Palestine… subtracted from all predicates where private and political uses of identity predicates are strictly separated (paragraphs 11, 13). He recommends that Israel no longer refer to itself as Jewish or Palestinian state.

Badiou’s essay seeks to reduce the unique communitarian identities of private citizens to a zero-level of national homogeneity in the political realm as a resolution to hostilities arising from these differences. Essentially, Badiou’s argument is that there can be no racial discrimination if there are no racial predicates in use. This argument is similar to offering decapitation as a remedy for headaches: no head, no headache.  Unfortunately, this reduces the particular identities and histories of citizens to political insignificance. The very assertion that the history and identity of Jewish people  (or Palestinians, black South Africans, Native Americans or American descendants of slaves for that matter) is politically insignificant is ethically abhorrent.

A re-reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is instructive before reading Badiou’s essay. Arendt spends a good deal of time in this work highlighting the precursors to the Shoah. She points out that the alien was a threat to the totalitarian state. Difference was viewed with distrust and had to be eliminated.  She writes:

The reason why highly developed political communities, such as the ancient city-states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always present differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred, mistrust, and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will, ie., the limitations of the human artifice. The “alien” is a frightening symbol of  the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy… No doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality are completely victorious, wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating or reducing to a minimum the dark background of difference, it will end in complete petrification and be punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is only the master, not the creator of the world (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301-302.)

One of the first acts of the Nazi regime was the transformation of European Jews and other undesirables into a “stateless mass”. European Jews were stripped of their citizenship and consequently were no longer protected by the law or subject to it.  As Giorgio Agamben, has pointed out, The Jew living under Nazism … may be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.) Badiou’s argument seems to be a linguistic equivalent of the Nazi’s political policy of de-nationalization. By removing the legal identity predicates from the Jews of Europe the Nazi’s created a group that was outside the law and could then be murdered without impunity. While one may concede that it was the elevation of the identity predicate “Jew” that allowed for this exceptional status under the Third Reich it must be admitted that the Nazis were systematically eliminating all identity predicates except one: Aryan. One wonders if Badiou’s suggestion might lead to exactly the same situation. Whenever identity predicates are removed from the political realm and human beings are denied the right for “self display”(cf.  Selbstdarstellung “the urge for self display’ Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, 29); that is the natural expression of difference, which Arendt argues is an innate impulse to reveal oneself as an individual, the conditions for the possibility of extermination are present. Arendt writes:

… whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive – in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others -has an urge to appear, to fit into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its “inner self” [which would be a zero-level predicate] but itself as an individual (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, 29)

The innate impulse for self-expression that takes the form of identity predicates in discourse can only be repressed at our own peril. Badiou’s call for the elimination of identity predicates in public discourse creates the conditions for the possibility of a new anti-Semitism. Let us take the time to read Arendt before we read Badiou.

In the Midst of the Catastrophe: My Journey into the Heart of Darkeness

I recently made a trip to Poland to visit three concentration camps: Auschwitz, Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and Majdanek. I wanted to see the depths to which humanity has descended. I did not ask “How could they do this?” because I knew what Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠syn had made so clear in The Gulag Archipelago that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being (Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn, The Gulag Archipelago, 75.)” We are all capable of the greatest good and the most egregious evil. We are all potential murderers. We are all guilty of what occurred in these camps. We cannot escape the responsibility by denying what happened, nor can we relinquish the responsibility by blaming others for what happened. The Shoah cannot be resolved. It can only be shouldered.

AUSCHWITZ

I took a train from Krakow to the town of Oswiecim. I walked from the Oswiecim train station (about 1km) to Auschwitz. On the way, I came across a mass grave where 700 prisoners from Auschwitz were executed in the final days of the camp’s existence. I paused to reflect on the individual lives that were starved, beaten, humiliated, murdered, and buried on the ground where I stood. It was a sobering moment. If I had known their names I would have recited them. A few blocks from the mass grave lay Auschwitz. Here the first experiments with gassing occurred. In this camp, prisoners were starved, beaten, shot, hanged, and gassed. Often, the corpses of murdered prisoners who had tried to escape were displayed in the center of the camp as a warning to other prisoners.

The local citizens did try to assist the prisoners in this camp by sending food, passing along messages to their families and hiding escaped prisoners. I was often reminded by Polish people that I met during my trip that “the Germans built the camps.” I took this comment to mean that the Polish people should not be held responsible for what had occurred in these camps. However, it is clear from several memoirs of survivors, that the Polish people who helped the prisoners of these camps were the exception rather than the rule. In fact, in Jedwabne, Poland the non-Jewish inhabitants murdered all of the towns Jewish inhabitants (1,600 people) except for 7 who were saved by a Polish family named Wyrzykowski. Even the local Catholic priest condoned the pogrom. The Germans did not initiate or participate in this pogrom. It was a strictly Polish campaign.

BIRKENAU

After walking through Auschwitz, I walked 3 km to Birkenau. It was here that the immensity and scale of the Shoah hit me. This camp was a gigantic death factory with four functioning gas chambers and crematoriums where 1.5 million people were murdered. While the red brick two-story buildings of Auschwitz had dwarfed me and confined me in in its corridors, Birkenau was massive and open. Auschwitz had been crowded with people, but Birkenau gave me space to walk and reflect. As I walked through the barracks and I prayed the Morning Office. Appropriately, the opening hymn dealt with shame, repentance, and mercy:

O God of mercy, hear our prayer,
for we are bowed in shame
To own our sin before your love
And beg in Jesus’ name
That you would heal what sin has pierced
With sword of bitter grief -
Our shriveled hearts, our darkened souls:

Send us, O God relief

After the barracks I walked up a long gravel road on the side of a camp and I came into a grove of Birch trees. Birkenau is named for these trees (Birkenau is German for birch tree). I recognized them immediately and my heart broke. I had read about these trees in several memoirs written by survivors. Here victims were made to wait their turn to enter the gas chambers. The trees had a calming effect on the waiting victims. Women calmed their children here, and hope, which always serves to anesthetize the sting of oppression and postpone resistance, was stillborn.

From there I walked through the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoriums. A Jewish man I met in a bookstore in Kasimierz challenged me to consider all of the knowledge that perished with the victims of the Shoah. “How many books will never be written? How many discoveries were indefinitely postponed?” I had never considered these far reaching consequences.

I will never forget a statement that I read inscribed on a plaque there: “The first to perish were the children… ” The horror of exterminating children reminded me of a passage from Elie Wiesel’s Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
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.
(Elie Wiesel, Night, 34)

MAJDANEK

I took a train to Lublin, Poland where the Majdanek concentration camp is located. Approximately 78,000 people were murdered at this camp. 59,000 were Jews. This camp more than any other left me speechless. It was not the immensity of the camp or the number of lives lost but the overall aesthetics that impacted me.

There is a mausoleum commemorating the lives that were lost at the end of a long road, called the Road of Homage, that runs from the ominous Monument of Struggle and Martyrdom at the the gates of the camp. The inscription on the mausoleum reads “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

As I walked up the steps I saw that the dome covers what appeared to be a mound of dirt. I later learned from a plaque that it was not dirt at all. To my horror, it was ashes of the victims recovered from a compost pile in the camp. It was the most sobering moment of my trip. I was staring into the remains of the Shoah. I was now face-to-face with victims of the most unspeakable crime of the Twentieth Century.

The gas chambers and crematorium are adjacent to the mausoleum. I walked into the room where prisoners were gassed, search for valuables and shoved into ovens to be cremated. I thought of the prisoners that worked here and I wondered how they were able to carry out there duties. To refuse to participate would have meant death by the same means. What is ethics in a place like this. Not just in the camps as a whole, but in the gas chambers where living human beings are asked to create dead human beings and reduce them to ash as if they had never existed. It is no wonder so many lost their faith afterwards.

REFLECTIONS

I will never forget this trip. It will, no doubt, influence my work philosophically for the rest of my life. I came away from this trip, and the reading I did, with the following reflections:

First, the correct term to describe what happened to the Jewish people during World War II is the Hebrew term Ha Shoah (the catastrophe), not the Holocaust (the sacrifice). The Jewish people were not sacrificed. They were murdered. It is a catastrophe, not a sacrifice. Often, the horror of the Shoah is too much for people to bear and they take one of two paths to escape it. Either they outright deny that it ever occurred and develop elaborate revisions of history to bolster their argument. Or, they try to draw some meaning from what happened by highlighting seemingly good things that occurred as a result of the Shoah. Both of these paths are attempts to resolve the Shoah and relinquish the burden it imposes. The fact is, the Shoah happened and it was a senseless and meaningless act of genocide. Human beings were murdered by other human beings. It cannot be resolved. It can only be shouldered.

Secondly, the Shoah is the end game of a three step process, in my view: disenfranchisement, expulsion, and extermination. First, people were disenfranchised through interpersonal prejudices and resentments. Polish people resented the Jewish people because they felt they had cooperated with the Russians in the invasion of Poland and the subsequent oppression that ensued. The Germans only needed to exacerbate these prejudices through a well orchestrated propaganda campaign where Jewish people were depicted ritually murdering children, stealing money and spreading Typhus. Next, people were expelled; that is people were removed from the normal order of things. Jewish people were no longer citizens and were moved into ghettos and then concentration camps. Finally, people were exterminated. This three step process accelerates as it develops. Resistance must always start at the level of disenfranchisement. The rate of success for resistance diminishes as the stages progress. I learned on this trip how important it is to remain vigilant when it comes to the seemingly innocent bigotries that creep into our lives. It only takes the right conditions and political apparatuses to be in place for genocide to occur.

Thirdly, as an American, I realized that we are no different than the German or Polish people. We have committed our own pogroms and mass executions. We have slaughtered Native Americans, seized their property and placed them on reservations. We have enslaved African-Americans and developed religious and economic justifications for their enslavement and oppression. We demonize gay and lesbian people and deny them basic rights afforded to other citizens, and have only recently decriminalized their lives. We paradoxically employ Mexican immigrants at reduced wages without the basic rights or privileges of American workers and expel them from our borders on a daily basis because we view them as a threat to our economy. We have created our own prison camps at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib and what happened in those camps is slowly beginning to emerge. Will we bear the responsibility for these offenses in the same way we expect the Germans and Poles to bear theirs? Where do we normalize prejudice and oppression? Where are the tracks of genocide being laid today?

The Shame of Homo Sacer

Contrary to Aristotle’s claim that shame is not properly a characteristic of a good person, except perhaps conditionally (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.9), Baruch Spinoza argued in his Ethics that shame was good:

… shame, like compassion, though, not a virtue, is yet good, insofar as it shows, that the  feeler of shame is really imbued with the desire to live honourably… therefore, though a man who feels shame is sorrowful, he is yet more perfect than he, who is shameless, and has no desire to live honourably(Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics, Part Four, Prop. LVIII.)

The person who feels shame is “more perfect” than the person who is shameless, because the feeling of shame indicates a desire to “live honorably”. To feel shame is to recognize the distance between one’s actions and what is honorable; and consequently, shame is already a kind of ethics, or at the very least, an ethical orientation.

The difference between Aristotle’s view of shame and Spinoza’s is no mere philosophical subtlety. It is the result of dramatic shift in the human subject as it emerged from Antiquity to Modernity. Foucault referred to this shift at the end of his introduction to The History of Sexuality where he wrote, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The life of the modern subject, according Foucault, has become politicized in what Foucault called bio-power, which brings “life and mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The modern human being finds their life called into question by the very apparatus that sustains it.

Giorgio Agamben has located the paradigm of the modern subject in the ancient Roman juridical figure of homo sacer, who having been judged for a crime was rendered sacred (removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it). As such, homo sacer was prohibited from being sacrificed but could be killed with impunity (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71.)” Agamben suggests the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany as an example of the life of homo sacer. The Jew in Nazi Germany was judged sacred, removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it. In the concentration camps, these homines sacri were reduced to bare life (zoe) until they became what were referred to as Muselmann, a being in whom all animal instincts and human reason is cancelled and yet lives. However, Agamben rejects that the extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps was a “Holocaust.” This term is an unfortunate misnomer, that indicates a sacrifice was made. The extermination of the Jewish people in the concentration camps was not a sacrifice. It was simply killing with impunity. Agamben writes:

The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed” inherent in the condition of the Jew as such (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.)”

Curiously, those who survived the camps wrestled with deep feelings of shame for having survived. Why? They had not committed any crime for which they should feel guilty. Surely no one would accuse a survivor of such horrific circumstances of having saved their lives at the expense of someone else’s. Agamben suggests that shame is the bedrock sentiment of homo sacer, not because they have committed an offense for which they should feel guilty but simply because of their status as sacred within the biopolitical sphere. Agamben defines shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject.” For Agamben, shame represents the locus of a new ethical material in the human being that lives in a post-Auschwitz world. “The lesson of Auschwitz,” writes Agamben, is that “the human being is the one who can survive the human being (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 133.)” This human being is “always beyond or before the human, the central threshold through which pass currents of the human and inhuman, subjectification and desubjectification, the living being’s becoming speaking and the logos’ becoming living (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 135.)”

Drawing on Marx’s claim that shame is the beginning of a revolution, Agamben argues that the modern subject feels a “silent shame of being human” that leads to a severing of the link between themselves and the political power in which they live. This is “the shame of the camps” which recognizes that the unimaginable has occurred; “that what should not have happened did happen (Agamben, Means Without End, 131). This kind of shame cannot be mastered through accepting it, as Nietzsche would have it in the myth of the eternal return, or declaring one’s innocence, as Nazi authorities attempted to do at Nuremberg by arguing that they were compelled to follow orders and therefore could not be held responsible for war crimes. Instead, this kind of shame becomes the fundamental structure of the human subject.

Shame is the “hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness” and means simply, “being consigned to something that cannot be assumed (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 128.)” What Agamben is suggesting in his definition of shame is that shame is the product of an ontological bipolarity intrinsic to the modern human subject that is simultaneously embedded in the bio-political sphere and extricating itself from it. As such, shame involves a paradoxical movement of “subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz, 107.)” What remains to be seen is where this shame will take us. For Agamben, it will move us toward a community that resists bio-political sovereignty that reduces life and makes homines sacri of us all. One can only hope that Spinoza was right, and that shame is the beginning of a more honourable life.

Der Muselmanner: Witness of the Lacuna

Giorgio Agamben has suggested der Muselmanner as an ethical cipher for the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. He refers to the concentration camps as an extreme situation; using the juridical sense of the term where a judge uses an extreme situation or state of exception “for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 1999, 48).” The concentration camps can therefore serve as a determinative paradigm for what his inhuman and what is human, and the Muselmann is the cipher for this determination. The Muselmann (the Muslim), so called because in his stooped and folded posture he resembled a Muslim at prayer, but also because the Arabic word muslim means “the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God (Agamben, 45)” were inmates in the camps who had given up. They had submitted to the will of the Nazis and become “the living dead” who were certain candidates for the gas chambers (Agamben, 51). They were walking symbols of the fate of every inmate and therefore the pariah of the camps. Some were so close to death that they no longer responded to the hunger impulse while others did not even respond to beatings given by the guards (Agamben, 42). Most inmates avoided the Muselmann and held them in disdain because what was at stake in the camps was to survive unchanged as a person and the Muselmann, by giving up, had “marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man (Agamben, 47).” And yet the Muselmann is an enigma standing on the border between life and death, a third realm between the human and the inhuman (Agamben, 48). It is precisely for this reason that the Muselmann are for Agamben, the “complete witness” of the camps (Agamben, 47). It is impossible to give an account of the horror of the camps. Only the dead can bear witness to this extreme situation. The survivors claim only to testify in their stead (Agamben, 34).

Drawing upon Agamben’s treatment of the Muselmann as the “complete witness” Slavoj Zizek argues that the Muselmann is “a kind of absolute/impossible witness… the only one who fully witnessed the horror of the concentration camp, and for that reason, is not able to bear witness (Zizek, Slavoj, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” in The Neighbor:Three Inquiries into Political Theology, 2005, 160).” Contrary to Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that the capacity to say “Here I am!” is intrinsic to the ethical subject, Zizek argues that the Muselmann can no longer say “Here I am!” because of his enigmatic status. This inability, Zizek suggests, constitutes a failure by Lévinas to account for the “inhuman Other” that is in inherent in the paradoxical figure of the Muselmann (Zizek, 160). Zizek writes:

Consequently, is the paradox of the Muselmann not that this figure is simultaneously a zero-level, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its “normal base”? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Lévinas: when describing it Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless, and this term should be given its full Lévinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, lack of depth (Zizek, 161).

But, the Muselmann is not simply inhuman, but also human. It is his paradoxical nature that is so terrifying. Zizek fails to see that the Muselmann has a face precisely in his facelessness. The face of the Muselmann, even in its facelessness still confronts us with the question “human or inhuman?” It is precisely here that the Muselmann calls us into question so that we become vulnerable to the enigma of the facelessness, and consequently are called to a work of justice that does not finally resolve the question “human or inhuman?” Instead, we stare into the facelessness of the Muselmann without retreating from the terrifying paradox he confronts us with. We cannot, and we must not, ever answer the question. It is a liturgy of justice that moves into the abyss of the Muselmann never to return. It is a vulnerability to the silence of the impossible testimony in the midst of the ethical lacuna of the concentration camps.

The Ethical Frame, Part 4: Redemption and Responsibility in The Reader

Have You Spent Much Time Thinking About The Past?

Michael’s marriage does not last and during the painful divorce he begins reading again and discovers his notebook where he kept track of all the books he had read to Hanna during their affair. He decides to record his readings of these books on cassette tapes and send them anonymously to Hanna. Hanna learns how to read and write in prison through these tapes and writes to Michael hoping to renew their relationship but Michael does not respond. Eventually, Hanna’s prison sentence is over and a prison official contacts Michael to assist with her release. Hanna does not have anyone else to help her. Michael agrees to help her and goes to visit her where he tells her that he as found a job and apartment for her. During their meeting Michael asks her, “Have you spent much time thinking about the past?” The question is a rupture in what had been up to that moment a casual conversation about her release. The question pares her prison experience down to an ethical inquiry. What Michael wants to know is whether the Hanna that helped him when he was sick, taught him to make love and nodded when he asked her if she loved him was still teeming behind the face of the woman who selected human beings for extermination. He wants to know if there is redemption. He wants to know if there is someone to redeem. Hanna responds that it doesn’t matter what she thinks or feels because “the dead are still dead.” Redemption glimmers in her answer. She realizes her responsibility for what has occurred. The severity of what she did cannot be mollified or ameliorated by her thoughts and feelings. She does not resolve the tension between the murdered and the murderer. She simply shoulders the responsibility for their deaths.

How Am I Supposed to Deal With This?

Hanna, cannot face her release and hangs herself in her cell the night before her release. She leaves a small tin with money she had saved and asks Michael to give it to the survivor who had testified at her trial. Michael travels to New York where he finds the woman who testified at Hanna’s trial and tells her about his relationship with Hanna. After Michael finishes sharing Hanna’s story with the woman she asks him, “How am I supposed to deal with this?” The question catches Michael off-guard. He had assumed she would find some solace in the story of a Nazi’s redemption. He had hoped that Hanna’s humanity would reveal itself in her story, but this was not the case. To accept the money would amount to granting Hanna absolution and that is not a gift the survivor can give. The dead remain dead. To absolve their killer would be an injustice. She refuses the money but suggest that Michael give it to a Jewish society for adult illiteracy. Michael agrees with this suggestion and leaves with a new sense of justice in which redemption involves responsibility; responsibility for the Other. This responsibility requires an act of substitution without the expectation of reciprocity. The film ends with Michael telling his daughter Hanna’s story.

The Ethical Frame, Part 3: Rupture and Redemption in The Reader

Having established a methodological approach to film as an ethical frame and having teased out a Levinasian notion of ethical time and discourse I will employ these insights in an analysis of the recent film The Reader. As this analysis will show, The Reader serves as a frame for discussing and debating the moral issues surrounding the Holocaust and Germany’s responsibility. David Hare, who wrote the screen play for the film, has written that the film was an attempt to articulate the dilemma of the succeeding generation of Germans who were wrestling with issue of truth and reconciliation.[1] The film is concerned with the rupture of the holocaust which called into question everything we believed about humanity and the hope of redemption. This observation demonstrates the intentional ethical frame of The Reader and the latent capacity of films in the Cinema of Redemption to serve as agents of temporal rupture and ethical provocation.

Four questions punctuate The Reader and constitute diachronic ruptures in which the Other is revealed and redemption becomes possible. Each question is answered in the film by one of the characters but remains unanswered for the audience. The questions reveal our responsibility for the Other and provoke us to moral action. These questions become catalysts for redemption, not just for the characters but for the audience as well.

Do You Love Me?

The film opens with the central character and narrator Michael Berg reminiscing about a time when he was fifteen in the Germany of the 1930s and became violently ill on a tram. Unable to control himself he vomits on the tram and gets off at the next stop and wanders the streets until he becomes exhausted and pauses in alley way where he vomits again. Hanna Schmitz, a moderately attractive middle-aged tram conductor, happens upon him, takes him to her apartment, cleans him up and walks him home. This act of kindness and compassion overwhelms and arouses the young Michael Berg. For the next three months, Michael remains confined to his bed with scarlet fever. After his recovery he returns to Hanna’s apartment to thank her for her kindness. During the visit Michael catches sight of Hanna undressing and when she sees him watching her she seduces him. This begins a series of regular sexual liaisons after Michael gets out of school each day. During their encounters Hanna asks that Michael read to her. They read Homer, Chekhov, Lessing, Twain, and others.

After several weeks of their affair, Michael and Hanna agree to meet on her tram when her shift ends. Michael boards the second car of the tram that Hanna is working on but she is in the first car. Michael anticipates that she will move back to the second car but she doesn’t. In fact, she acts as if she doesn’t know him. Michael is hurt by this and follows Hanna to her apartment when she finishes her shift but she asks him to leave. He is devastated by her actions but Hanna is indifferent to his feelings. He cannot believe that this woman whom he loves could treat him in this way. Their argument escalates and he leaves but returns a short time later. He fears their relationship is ending but Hanna does not seem to mind. She is cold and indifferent. He tells her that he cannot imagine living without her and then asks her, “Do you love me?” She looks at him oddly as if the question is unintelligible. Suddenly, her indifference is ruptured by Michael’s question. The reverberations of a vulnerable Other echo in the question. She is bound to this Other, this boy whom she has seduced and used for her pleasure and intellectual stimulation. She is responsible for him. She nods and invites him to bathe with her. Her nod is not an answer but simply an affirmation of Michael’s proximity and her responsibility. She redeems him from despair with a nod. The question exceeds the bounds of “what is love?” and “who is loved?” The echo of the Other that makes love possible resounds in the question and reverberates in the ears of the audience. The affair ends abruptly after Hanna is notified that she is being promoted to a clerical position at the tram authority. Michael arrives at her apartment the next day only to find it empty and no sign of Hanna. He becomes distraught and mourns for his loss.

Have You Spent Much Time Thinking About The Past?

The film, then leaps to Michael’s days in law school in the 1960s where he takes a course taught by a professor who is a holocaust survivor. As part of the course the professor has the students attend a trial of several female SS guards who were accused of allowing 300 Jewish prisoners to die in a burning church during the Allied liberation of Auschwitz. Michael is shocked to see his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, among the defendants. During the trial a survivor of Auschwitz testifies that each of the guards on trial participated in the selection process that led to the extermination of prisoners under their watch. She adds that Hanna Schmitz had favorites that she would invite to her room to read to her and pass over in the selection process. Michael is reminded of their affair and how he used to read to her. When the court produces a handwritten report of the church fire Hanna’s fellow defendants testify that she wrote the report. Although she denies the allegation initially she eventually admits to writing it to avoid providing handwriting sample. Michael then realizes that Hanna is a functioning illiterate and would rather accept responsibility for genocide than admit her illiteracy.

When the judge asks Hanna about her role in the selection of prisoners for the gas chambers and whether or not she knew that she was sending them to their deaths; she admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and, quite matter-of-factly, admits that it was their job to select certain weaker and sickly prisoners for extermination in order to make room for new prisoners. Hanna, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings to break into Hannah’s world. The human beings under her charge are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hanna’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp.

Hanna’s embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge, “What would you have done?” The question ruptures the synchrony of the film. The questioner becomes the questioned. The judge appears to not even understand the question. He is shocked that Hanna is unaware of how she could have acted differently. She was only doing her job, she says. They were prisoners and she was a guard, she says. She had to make room for others. Her question to the judge exceeds the frame of the film and spills out into the audience. The echo of the Other resounds in the question as the one for whom we are responsible. The question provokes us to ask ourselves what we would have done in Hanna’s position. Redemption stands at the nexus of our vulnerability and our responsibility for the Other.

Michael, lives a Other-centered life overwhelmed by diachronic time. Michael is stunned to witness Hanna’s lack of remorse and the apparent banality of evil. How could this woman who had shown him such kindness, compassion and love, have committed such a heinous act without any remorse? Michael looks at the faces of survivors in the courtroom. He is overwhelmed by a temporal disjunction that cuts across his previous life with Hannah, his role as a student, and his own naive perspectives. Human beings were murdered. He cannot reduce them to prisoners. He is responsible for them and, ironically, he is responsible for Hannah. Michael can answer Hannah’s question, “What would you have done?” because he is vulnerable to the Other echoing in the question.

When Michael visits Auschwitz and plunges into a moral crisis. Michael is faced with a moral dilemma. He can notify the court that she is a functioning illiterate which would humiliate Hanna and absolve her of primary responsibility or he can remain silent and preserve her from shame and allow her to be convicted. Michael chooses not to disclose her secret and to let justice work itself out. Hanna receives a life sentence and is sent to prison. Michael goes on to begin his career, marry, and have children, leaving his past with Hanna behind.

[1] Hare, David. “Truth and Reconciliation,” The Guardian, December 13, 20008.

The Ethical Frame, Part 2: The Reader and Synchronic Time

Time is a crucial theme in the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Lévinas. It stands as a point of divergence between these two thinkers. For Heidegger, time is a product of a solitary subject in the world. For Lévinas, time is a relationship between a subject and the Other. In this essay, I will compare and contrast each of these thinker’s notions of time and argue that Heidegger’s notion of time is Dasein-centric[1] and leaves no room for the other, while Lévinas’ notion of time is Other-centric and creates space for difference. The point of these distinctions will be to demonstrate that Heidegger’s notion of time makes justice impossible and Lévinas’ notion of time makes justice possible. I will then apply this analysis to the two principle characters in the film The Reader. Assuming our previous characterization of film as an ethical frame and The Reader as an example of the Cinema of Redemption I will argue that the character Hannah Schmitz lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time; whereas, the character Michael Berg lives an Other-centric life overwhelmed by diachronic time. By employing these two characters in this way, The Reader can be characterized as confronting the audience with an ethical dilemma by employing the element of temporal disjunction.

For Martin Heidegger time is the horizon for the understanding of Being and temporality is the Being of Dasein, which understands Being.[2] In a certain sense, Heidegger sees being and time as synonymous terms. Dasein is a temporal being, which Heidegger calls Being-in-the-world, who is thrown into existence and stretched along between birth and death.[3] The stretching along between birth and death constitutes the historical temporality of Dasein.[4] Dasein is a historical being in time. Time is therefore Dasein-centric.

Heidegger observes that birth is the beginning of dying for Dasein and that its existence is a Being-towards-death.[5] Death, Heidegger says, is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.[6] Death confronts Dasein with its finitude. Additionally, death reveals the possibility of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.[7] Dasein responds to death by either fleeing from it (falling) or anticipating it (resoluteness) both of which constitute an existential structure that Heidegger calls care.[8] Birth and Death are connected in the between of Dasein’s care. [9] Heidegger describes the structure of care as a primordial structural totality of Being-ahead-of-itself (future), Being-already-in (past), and Being-alongside-entities-within-the-world (present).[10] Unlike things which simply persist through time, Dasein is aware of the past, present and future as a meaningful integrated whole. However, Heidegger is adamant that Dasein is first and foremost a furtural being in that Dasein, in its own most potentiality-for-Being, comes toward itself.[11] The essence of Dasein’s existence is therefore the temporalization of its temporality.
[12]

In The Reader, Hannah Schmitz, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. When Hannah is asked at her trial why she did not release prisoners from a burning barn she responded that she was a guard and her it was her job to prevent the prisoners from escaping. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings burning to death in the barn to break into Hannah’s world. The people inside the barn are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hannah’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp. Her embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge “what would you have done?” She is clearly not blind to other options. The prisoners must die because her role as guard does not allow any other option.

[1] Dr. Charles Bambach (University of Texas at Dallas) and Dr. Gilbert Garza (University of Dallas) recently made me aware that this characterization of Heidegger only represents the early-Heidegger and does not take into account the onto-centric shift in the later Heidegger.
[2] Heidegger, Being and Time, 39.
[3] Ibid., 174, 425.
[4] Ibid., 427.
[5] Ibid., 426.
[6] Ibid., 294.
[7] Ibid., 307.
[8] Ibid., 84.
[9] Ibid., 426-427.
[10] Ibid., 237, 238.
[11] Ibid., 373.
[12] Ibid., 378.

The Ethical Frame, Part 1: The Reader and the Cinema of Redemption

Using the conceptual models and critical methodologies of Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas on time, movement, narrative and ethics, Sam B. Girgus has suggested the term Cinema of Redemption to describe films released from the 1930s through the 1960s that enact and promulgate a Levinasian ethic.[1] Girgus observes that films in this group are based upon a narrative paradigm of moral crisis and conversion that lead to the protagonist’s redemption through self-abnegation. Girgus explains:

The films in this group [Cinema of Redemption] invariably centre on a moment of moral crisis and conversion of personal belief and action for a hero who adopts an ethical code that resonates with Levinasian ethics on the level of popular culture expression. This change involves an abnegation and sacrifice of the self, almost at times to the point of martyrdom, in favour of the ethical priority of the other. It proclaims absolute responsibility for the other.[2]

Examples of these types of films include: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and his It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961), Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954).[3] Girgus points out that in each of these films the hero often experiences a different dimension of time that suggests an ethical realm that breaks from ordinary life. This new experience demands different ways of thinking, looking and ultimately living.[4] The hero’s experience of the ethical realm constitutes a temporal disjunction that enables the protagonist to act from an ethical position of love and compassion for the other.

Girgus develops this notion of temporal disjunction out of Levinas’ distinction between synchronic time in which everything is crystallized and sclerosized into substance and diachronic time which is infinite and therefore refuses conjunction and totalization.[5] The ethical realm is a transcendent realm that interrupts the life of the protagonist bringing about a moral crises that is resolved in an act of substitution for the other. Beyond the experience of the protagonist, it could be argued that the audience also vicariously experiences this temporal disjunction. The liminal quality of the protagonist’s crisis and conversion creates a cinematic chiasm by which the diachronic ethical realm breaks into the synchronic realm of the audience. The hero’s crisis and conversion becomes a vicarious conversion for the audience and leads to moral crisis to be resolved negatively, positively, or indifferently at the conclusion of the film. This chiastic in the Cinema of Redemption allows these films to serve as agents of temporal disjunction and ethical provocation.

It could be argued that the periodization of the Cinema of Redemption could be expanded beyond the 1930s and 1960s to include any film that is based on a narrative paradigm of moral crisis and conversion that lead to the protagonist’s redemption through self-abnegation. If this expansion is accepted, Stephen Daldry’s recent film adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader , which takes place during the 1930s and the 1960s, could be characterized as a film in this group. David Hare, who wrote the screen play for the movie has observed that Schlink’s novel was attempt to articulate the dilemma of the succeeding generation of Germans who were wrestling with issue of truth and reconciliation.[6] This observation demonstrates intentional ethical frame of The Reader and the latent capacity of films in the Cinema of Redemption to serve as agents of temporal disjunction and ethical provocation.

[1] Girgus, Sam B. “Beyond Ontology: Levinas and the Ethical Frame in Film,” Film-Philosophy 11.2 (2007): 98, .
[2] Ibid., 98.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 99.
[5] Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981. Orginally published as Autrement quêtre ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1974), 9, 11.
[6] Hare, David. “Truth and Reconciliation,” The Guardian, December 13, 20008.