The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead. (Des Pres 1988, p. 217)
Abstract
Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, however, is not simply located in its object, in the cruelty of what happened in the camp. The Shoah makes us at the same time facing the unimaginable ‘real’ of the modern subject—the blind spot in our own identity. If we need imagination to deal with the Shoah, it is also because of an ungraspable ‘real’ in ourselves. This is why adequate Shoah representations, acknowledging their object as being beyond representation, include the same ‘beyond’ concerning the subject of the Holocaust memory. The essay makes this clear in an elaborated comparison of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film, Shoah, with some conceptual works of art from the late nineties—all of this ‘fine-tuned’ in a reflection upon Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
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Notes
Conspiracy, 2001, by Frank Pierson, with Kenneth Branah, Clare Bullus and Stanley Tucci. This movie retakes the 1984 television series by Heinz Schirk, with Dieterich Mattausch as Heydrich.
God on Trial, docudrama, BBC & Boston Television, van Frank Cottrell Boyce, 85 min, 2008. See http://www.psb.org/wgbh/masterpiece/godontrial/index.html.
See specifically the essays Claude Lanzmann, “Hier ist kein Warum”: pp. 51–52; Fred Camper, “Shoah’s Absence”: pp. 103–112; Dominick LaCarpa, “Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’: ‘Here There Is No Why’”: pp. 191–232.
For an extensive discussion of some of these examples, from a different perspective from the one we are elaborating here, see the third chapter of Van Alphen 2004.
“In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer höchsten Bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes.” (Hegel 1955, p. 57).
For visual art, this moment is crystallized in the figure of Gustave Courbet and his ‘realism’. He realized that the art of his days was locking itself up in its realm of beauty (i.e. of ‘les beaux arts’), and had lost connection with the ‘real’ reality of current time. Hence his claim, expresses in both his art and his pamphlets, that art must whether become realistic or disappear. That requirement to be realistic (i.e. to guide visually the real tendencies of the progressing times), although fulfilled by no artistic ‘-ism‘, hallmarks art‘s modernity until now.
Directed by Marvin J. Chomski and staring (among others) Meryl Streep and Fritz Weaver. The series won several prices, but was also immediately criticized—by Elie Wiesel for instance—for ‘trivializing’ the Holocaust and economically exploiting it.
The background of this definition of the subject is the Lacanian structuralist theory of the subject, according to which the human world is constituted out of a semiotic system, of a autonomously functioning network of signifiers. The subject is a supposition, produced by the interaction between the libidinal being and those signifiers. ‘Supposition‘is literally the definition of the subject: it is what is put under (sub) the signifiers, i.e. what is supposed to be the bearer of the signifier. To put it ‘technically’, as Lacan does in the beginning of his seminar on identification (in the lesson of 6 December 1962, unpublished), in a passage defining the signifier (while, in reality he is defining the subject): ‘the signifier is what represents for another signifier’.
Lloyd Michaels points suggestively in that direction in his essay “Bergman and the Necessary Illusion” (Michaels 2000, p.18).
References
De Kesel, M. (2009). Eros and ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Des Pres, T. (1988). Holocaust laughter? In B. Lang (Ed.), Writing and the Holocaust: Conference: Papers. New York: Holmes & Meier.
Feinstein, S. (2000). Zbigniew Libera’s Lego concentration camp: Iconoclasm in conceptual art about the Shoah. Other Voices 2(1):2 (Web).
Hegel, G. (1955). Ästhetik. In F. Bassenge (ed), (p. 57). Berlin: Aufbau (Print).
Liebman, S. (2007). Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key essays. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Michaels, L. (2000). Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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De Kesel, M. The Documentary Real and the Shoah. Found Sci 23, 245–254 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9518-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9518-3