from History and Memory Volume 12, Number 2

Against Holocaust-Sublime
Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory

Zachary Braiterman

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To the generation that directly suffered the Holocaust or witnessed it at one remove, ethical imperatives to remember Auschwitz must have seemed and seem clear and simple; but not today when the burden of memory increasingly falls upon a public whose members were born after the events they recall. No longer the sole purview of survivors, memory more and more depends upon the varied work of artists, scholars and community functionaries (painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, literary critics, art historians, politicians, clergy, educators, philanthropists, ideologues). In the following pages, I build on the work of recent critics to make a philosophical point about how one remembers: with what sympathies, suspicions, critical methods, narratives, images, tone, language and affect. I start with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim for whom the Holocaust undermined "philosophy" by provoking wonder and astonishment. Identified by Fackenheim with revelation, these constitute affective sources against which Reason has allegedly sought to protect itself.1 Arthur Cohen advanced the same argument when he wrote, "There is something in the nature of thought--its patient deliberateness and care for logical order--that is alien to the enormity of the death camps."2

Like so much reflection upon the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s, these sentiments unwittingly teetered on the edge of art. In fact, the attention to wonder and enormity that Fackenheim and Cohen find alien to philosophy has its origin in philosophical aesthetics. Writing in the eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics to mean "the science of perception." He explained, "The Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers have already carefully distinguished between things perceived and things known."3 Baumgarten took as his main focus the organization of representations forming sensual, poetic perception. The wonder demanded by Fackenheim has a place in that order. Baumgarten proposed, "By wonder we mean an intuition of many things in a representation, such things as are not found together in many series of our perceptions." He continued to state, "in the extraordinary we sense, rather than implicitly assert a relation to the inconceivable."4 This same sentiment fits Fackenheim's response to resistance during the Holocaust. Ghetto fighters, pious Hasidim, pregnant women and "righteous gentiles." Natural explanations (social, biological, psychological) only heightened the sense of wonder with which their example struck him. At one point, extending through some fifteen pages of text, Fackenheim repeatedly exclaimed, "Once again the categories 'willpower' and 'natural desire' seem inadequate. Once again we touched an Ultimate."5

Indeed, the Holocaust almost becomes sublime in contemporary thought, be it post-Holocaust or postmodern. Presented in the philosophical tradition, "sublime" refers first to the feeling involved when the human imagination and understanding have reached their limit. Such epistemological crisis shaped the work of Fackenheim and Cohen and riddled the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Julia Kristeva. The Holocaust itself may very well have outstripped the human power to understand. On the other hand, the rhetoric that shapes this insight--an often automatic recourse to words like incomprehensible, uncanny, unspeakable, tremendum--carries consequences that complicate that simple sense. Holocaust-memory turns "aesthetic" with each passing generation: a point that critics like Dominick LaCapra and Michael André Bernstein writing in the mid- to late 1990s have begun to suspect and work through. The course assumed in this essay provides a relatively obscure detour back to Mendelssohn, Kant and Schiller. Classical Enlightenment aesthetic theory shows why contemporary critics have begun contesting Holocaust-memory that assumes the argot of sublimity and why they adopt a style that Mendelssohn and Schiller called "naive."

Sublime

In "On the sublime and naive in the fine sciences," Moses Mendelssohn saw how the physically immense, noted by Cohen, takes one by the "surprise" signaled by Fackenheim. Mendelssohn recognized the moment in which "the soul is momentarily stopped in its tracks and gazes astounded, at this immensity."6 In contrast to this attention to immense objects, Kant's critical discussion of sublimity revolves more insistently around the subject and its judgments. According to Kant, beauty and sublimity do not inhere in objects but refer to the conditions by which the subject judges them. An object appears beautiful when the subject's intuition of it enters into a free and harmonious play with the concepts of the understanding (e.g. cause-effect). In the case of judging an object sublime, the subject's Imagination refers the mind to the ideas of reason (God, world, soul, freedom). By "Mathematically Sublime," Kant meant feeling the inability of the Imagination to bring an absolutely large representation into a single intuition. By "Dynamically Sublime," Kant meant judging phenomena in terms of might and power. The human subject now discovers before nature its physical impotence. Physiological power and sensual need are reduced to nought before the compelling power of nature.7

In presenting the Pathetically Sublime, Schiller took Kant one step further. By and large, Kant had confined his discussion to natural objects and architectural artifacts like pyramids. In Schiller's essays, human pain and history, the sight and site of human suffering, assumed stronger central focus. They took on the status of a second nature, a magnificent and terrifying colossus. Hegel, of course, would refer to "the slaughter bench of history." Schiller also stressed the full salvo of suffering, the need to confront suffering, sensual nature face to face.8 "Considered from this perspective and only from this perspective," Schiller claimed, "world history is for me a sublime object. The world as a historical object is at bottom nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with human freedom. History reports to us the success of this engagement." As if anticipating Fackenheim's own post-Holocaust critique of philosophy, Schiller concluded that "[t]he claims of experience refute all the well-meant attempts of philosophy to bring about what the moral world demands into harmony with what the real world does." Schiller observed how sensual nature "flaunts all the rules prescribed to it by our understanding; going its own willful, uninhibited way, it tramples into the dust the creations of both wisdom and chance with the same indifference."9

I do not mean to say that the Holocaust was sublime, but it almost became so as its memory took shape in the memory of survivors and witnesses once or twice removed (Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Charlotte Delbo, Elie Wiesel and so many others). I include among this first generation of memory formation the work of Fackenheim, Cohen, Claude Lanzmann, Saul Friedländer and theorists like Lyotard writing in the 1970s and early 1980s under the rubric of postmodernism. In these varied works the Holocaust veered toward the sublime: almost. Neither the Holocaust nor its first-memory accords with a second set of criteria by which an object or event appears sublime. In neoclassical theory, sublime judgment contains two moments. The first, the moment with which the first generation of Holocaust-memory accords, is negative. Its shock unsettles the imagination and the understanding. In contrast, a second moment (1) stimulates pleasant sensation, (2) intensifies moral sentiment and virtue and (3) presumes the physical safety of the one who judges. With this recuperation in mind, the Holocaust and its first-memory do not conform to sublime judgment. At the same time, recalling this second moment ultimately undermines the use of that rhetoric of ruin, shock and incomprehensibility by a generation of memorialists born further and further from the event they register.

First: Holocaust-memory calls into serious doubt what Mendelssohn, Kant and Schiller took for granted: a pleasing shudder before objects of enormous size, objects that threaten by their power and the sight of human suffering. In the neoclassical and romantic traditions, adjectives describing the sublime include "sweet" and "harmonious." Such verbal affect ultimately overwhelms those forms of Holocaust-memory that rely upon the language of negation. The first generation of Holocaust-memorialists writing in the 1970s and 1980s did not mean to provoke pleasure. But that does not settle this basic quandary. In "Rhapsody or additions to the Letters on sentiments," Mendelssohn rejected the commonly held view that "the unpleasant sentiment is a representation we prefer not to have." Indeed, we may very often want the representation, if not the evil it presents.10 These comments regarding mixed sentiments provide a troubling theoretical challenge to Holocaust-memory. The very pleasure cited by Mendelssohn might soon preclude a rhetoric of shock and incomprehensibility for this reason. Given the following two conditions, the expression of that shock soon sounds pleasant, sentimental and even maudlin.

Second: Objects of enormous size, objects that threaten by their power, and the sight of human suffering are judged sublime when they meet a basic rational condition. To be sure, Kant's sublime disrupts the beautiful harmony between sense and the concepts and categories of the understanding. Nonetheless, Kant never doubted the sublime sovereignty of reason. According to Kant, reason takes pleasure not in the sublimity of the object, but in its own operation. Judging an object Mathematically Sublime generates a feeling of respect, not for the external object, but for the power of our own reason to seek and proceed toward an infinity that lies beyond its sense. At the same time, and herein lies the pleasure in judging nature Dynamically Sublime, the subject discovers the superiority of reason and moral principle over the sensual nature within us and the nature without.

Schiller's analysis complicated, but never quite quit, this link between aesthetics and ethics. On the one hand, he noted the autonomy that aesthetic judgment enjoys over against moral virtue. Schiller knew with Mendelssohn that human beings also enjoy the sight of vice and villains. Aesthetic autonomy means that subjects take pleasure in that which they do not morally approve. Bold moral activity and the exercise of virtue might also excite aesthetic interest, but only insofar as they display power, not because of any moral character per se.11 On the other hand, Schiller asserted with Kant the autonomy of moral nature over sensual nature. He took for an example the Laocoön group: an ancient sculpture of the suffering Laocoön struggling to save his sons from the coils of dreadful serpents. Merely sensuous beings would have fled or stood still and simply suffered. In contrast, Laocoön is a moral being freely surrendering himself to the disaster that destroys him.12 In short, aesthetic judgment and moral reason conflict with each other. One lacks restraint, the other is law-abiding. In the end, however, no real conflict stands between them. The destructive serpents provoke moral resistance from Laocoön which provides sensual pleasure to the spectator.

The example of the Holocaust clearly calls into question Schiller's account of pathetically sublime resistance; and yet his account works to warn against a certain danger attending Holocaust-memory. At one level of analysis, Holocaust-memory clearly disturbs Schiller's notion of moral autonomy and the spiritual pleasure provided by Laocoön's heroism. According to Lawrence Langer, "[r]esistance was a thoroughly practical matter, having nothing to do with the welfare of the spirit."13 Both LaCapra and Friedländer lend credence to Langer's view that heroism lends no comforting closure to Holocaust-trauma and its memory. Both cite Antek Zuckerman (second in command of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising) who tells Lanzmann: "If you could lick my heart it would poison you."14 Even the memory of heroic resistance remains tainted by an overriding trauma. This suggests nothing of the moral autonomy championed by Schiller. At the same time, Schiller's insight about aesthetic autonomy effectively reminds us to suspect accounts highlighting the moral sublimity of resistance. They risk taking pleasure in "Nazi villains" for the part they play in provoking that heroism. As Holocaust-memory increasingly turns around heroes, martyrs and their innocent and edifying image as its central focus, it begins to worm into aesthetic pleasure; especially in the popular media and school curricula. This, of course, depends on the following, last condition by which the subject can judge an object sublime.

Third: Physical safety represents a critical condition by which one can judge sublime objects of enormous size, objects that threaten by their power, and the sight of human suffering. This safety necessitates spatial and/or temporal distance from the threatening object. It requires that the subject does not actually suffer. In Kant's description, the object judged sublime never really threatens. We can "consider an object fearful without being afraid of it." The subject feels overwhelmed by "amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred thrill; but since he knows he is safe, this is not actual fear."15 Schiller, for whom moral sublimity trumps physical threat, also knew that people do not judge their own suffering sublime. Aesthetic judgment is finished when the subject finds itself in danger. Schiller noted: "As sublime as a storm at sea may be when viewed from the shore, those who find themselves on the ship devastated by the storm are just as little disposed to pass this aesthetic judgment on it."16

The first generation of Holocaust-memory still stood at that stage described by Mendelssohn: "If the object gets too close to us, if we regard it as a part of us or even as ourselves, the pleasant character of the representation completely disappears.... The representation then has nothing pleasant about it but rather will be simply painful." As such, suffering must be set at a distance, historically and geographically. It should represent "tales of bygone times and faraway places." The illusion of art allows one to pretend that representations are real. This makes them more vivid. However, when the image becomes too unpleasant, the subject remembers that it is just a representation.17 In contrast, recent and traumatic historical memory provides less license. The Holocaust does not (yet) relate a tale of "bygone times and faraway places."

Mendelssohn could not conceive radical, unadulterated evil. "Everything evil that is to be encountered in nature and can be simply conceived," he wrote, "is mixed with something good. The most perfect evil would be an entity to which nothing but negative features are ascribable, sheer absurdity!"18 The classical notion of sublimity rested on this exact confidence. For that reason, I suspect, Edith Wyschogrod recently rejects Kant's sublime, referring to its domesticated character. She asks: "Would the writing of history not be better served by a 'politics of interpretation' that would place the res gestae under the sign of the wild sublime?" Wyschogrod points away from Kant toward the romantics, assuming that their sublime shows that very wildness. And yet, the very language used by Wyschogrod reiterates her own suspicions contra Kant. Cataclysmic history does not jibe with what she herself calls an "inspirational sublime."19

Romantic dissonance, melancholy, death, destruction, chaos and fragments ultimately assumed a fantastic and delightful character. In his Dialogues on Poetry, Friedrich Schlegel had Ludovico (in the "Talk on Mythology") compare ancient Greek poetry to an "organic chaos" of individual poems. The highest beauty, the highest order is that of chaos unfolding as a harmonious world touched by love. The new mythology sought by Schlegel should constitute an artfully ordered confusion, a charming symmetry of contradictions, a wonderfully perennial alteration between enthusiasm and irony.20 In the "Essay about the Different Styles in Goethe's Early and Late Work," Schlegel had Marcus explain that in Goethe's Torquato Tasso everything, even disharmony, retains a harmonious tone. In Egmont, the protagonist lives a higher life in himself and in his soul everything is harmonious. Even pain dissolves in music and tragic catastrophe yields a mild impression.21 Sublime, romantic chaos was never wild. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarth and Jean-Luc Nancy note, "there is chaos and there is chaos, so to speak." The properly poetic task is to construct chaos, to make a work from disorganization.22 Secure at the center of that work is the romantic subject variously construed (e.g. the poet, the act of auto-production). Lacoue-Labarth and Nancy quote Rahel Levin's description of Schlegel: a "head in which operations unfold." The artist turns into the absolute subject who machinates, structures, mixes, engenders, fragments and poeticizes itself.23

The sublime subject appears just as safe in the work of postmodern thinkers like Lyotard and Kristeva. There too the sublime plays an edifying function, but surreptitiously. In works like The Postmodern Condition, The Inhuman and The Differend, Lyotard has described how pragmatic criteria of knowledge (based on money, power, technology) undermine the myths and narratives that once legitimated science and Enlightenment. He surveys the process of complexification by which aggregates clump into larger and larger informational nexi. A common recourse to the sublime has characterized this oeuvre. Lyotard rejects the totalizing expansion by which a technological monad synthesizes everything into its system. The sublime is said to interrupt its operation. Examples include abstract art and free language modes epitomized by avant-garde artists. Examples taken from philosophy encompass such "paralogical" phenomena as undecidables, limits to precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, the temporary, the inability to achieve clear consensus, and provisional contracts.24 Lyotard's postmodern sublime includes "the jews," at once a real historical referent and a symbol for uncanny and avant-garde figures who resist totality. They offer a way to approach the unfathomable that does not try to thematize, heal, etc. They represent the Other deep within the psychic apparatus called Western culture. In turn, the West has tried but cannot convert, expel, integrate or exterminate this Other.25

And the Holocaust? It plays a more deeply ambiguous part in Lyotard's presentation. On the one hand, it represents the totalizing force that sublime "jews" resist. On the other hand, the Holocaust represents a sublime figure in its own right. It is the "differend" par excellence, by which Lyotard has meant two things. A technical term, the differend speaks to the condition in which consensus becomes impossible; the condition in which language as we know it breaks down. A case of unadjudicable conflict, like the difference between Jews and Nazis, it allows no uniform rule uniting heterogeneous differences. As such, the differend stands for

the unstable state and instant of language wherein something that must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.... This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: "one cannot find the words" etc.... In the differend, something "asks" to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away ... what remains to be phrased exceeds what [one] can presently phrase.26

This description of the differend and its application to the Holocaust shares many of the same virtues and problems that characterize Fackenheim's work. Both Lyotard and Fackenheim have shown an incessant wrestling with the Holocaust and its philosophical implications. Both highlight the inability to comprehend, to represent, to "phrase" the Holocaust.

Moreover, Lyotard's postmodernism shares with Fackenheim's post-Holocaust Jewish thought a similar imperative voice. Take for instance Lyotard's reading of Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross (subtitled Lama Sabachtani--Hebrew for "Why have you forsaken me?"). Lyotard calls this a specifically Jewish Passion, one without reconciliation, one that still waits for the Messiah who will bring meaning. "Being announces itself in the imperative.... The work rises up in an instant, but the flash of the instant strikes it like a minimal command: Be."27 The same imperative minimalism informs Fackenheim's discussion of one Pegalia Lewinska who wrote "I felt under orders to live.... And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being, I would hold on to my dignity."28 Eschewing "comprehension," both Lyotard and Fackenheim stress the same ontological-ethical imperative (to be, to live). In this respect, Lyotard's discussion of the Holocaust shares many of the same weaknesses that Fackenheim's critics have noted. First, what sense does it make to call the Holocaust unrepresentable? Second, does not the very argot of resistance and sublimity (Jews and gentiles resisting the Nazi logic of destruction, sublimity breaking the machinations of totality, to live, BE) evoke the heroic rhetoric rejected by Langer?

Lyotard wants the sublime to strike what Wyschogrod called a "wild" figure in order to have it overcome the power of "totality." But this requires him to overstate the disaster that the sublime inflicts on reason and the understanding, both in Kant's work and in his own. The subtle argument in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime constitutes a case in point.29 Lyotard has to account for the fact that Kant had sublime feeling yield to practical-moral reason. He admits that nature, imagination and sensation are sacrificed to the law of practical reason. This said, Lyotard springs his trap. Reason is said to take no delight in this sacrifice to it! Lyotard calls it "a violence of feeling," and quotes Kant to say that the sublime "cannot merit any delight on the part of reason." Kant's sublime is said by Lyotard to remain useless, without ethical result.30 But the following concession ruins this argument. Lyotard notes: "All that can be conceded to sublime feeling in the consideration of morality is resistance ... the resistance of virtue to passions, to 'fear,' 'superstition,' the 'frailty of human nature,' and its 'shortcomings'."31 That's quite a concession insofar as resistance represents an ethical figure! The understanding may not recoup, but reason does because it shapes moral resistance. This concession shows with Wyschogrod that the sublime was never really wild in Kant.

Nor is it "wild" in Lyotard's own work, despite his own intent. The argument in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime ignores the edifying function that the sublime assumes throughout his larger oeuvre: to resist the increasing totalization that marks the postmodern information age. Without the sublime and its incursions, without abstract art and avant-garde poetry that undermine commonsensical consensus, there would be no way to counter the pragmatic accumulation of knowledge and information. And this very resistance registers pleasure, even when the topic at hand turns to Auschwitz. At least, it threatens to do so.

Julia Kristeva's work on the abject carries out this threat. In Powers of Horror, the abject stands for that which has no definable object. It disturbs order, system, identity, borders, positions and rules. Neither subject nor object,

It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to [the superego's] rules of the game. And yet from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.... A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which ... now harries me as radically separate, loathsome.32

Kristeva's discussion moves from incest taboos, phobic desire, the fear of women, biblical taboos surrounding food and menstrual blood, the Christian abjection of speech and thought and finally to the abject in the art of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Noting Kristeva's aversion to Céline's virulent anti-Semitism and fascism, Wyschogrod still faulted her for turning the suffering Other into a figure of beauty. She quotes Kristeva who writes: "It is impossible not to hear the liberating truth of [Céline's] call to rhythm and joy, beyond the crippling constraints of a society ruled by monotheistic symbolism and its political and legal repercussions."33

Kristeva describes the abject as a "massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness" that disrupts symbolic form. As such, it represents another sublime figure in the history of continental philosophy. It also conveys psychoanalytic, political and spiritual good; despite Kristeva's claim that it constitutes the other side of religion, morality and ideology. At the conclusion of Powers of Horror, she asks "in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?" An odd question insofar as the abject and attention to it, if they were truly abject, should have to serve no meaning, good or point. And yet, allowing the abject to burst out is said to effect psychological hygiene. It is also said to serve the ideological good of demystifying power.34 In Revolution in Poetic Language the uncanny signifying process represented by poetry constitutes "a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society. Then--and only then--can it be jouissance and revolution."35 Lastly, back to Powers of Horror, the abject assumes a "spiritual" value by negating dreary, material existence. Kristeva has horror speak to that "sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us." Quoting Céline, who now gets the last word, she ends her study of the abject, noting that that fiery burst of beauty "cancels our existence."36

Critically building upon a discussion of Kristeva, the art critic Hal Foster wondered if the abject is "the fastest route for contemporary rogue-saints to grace."37 We wonder with him whether that fiery burst of beauty enjoyed by postmodern rogue-saints was ever and even worth the blood-price with which it comes. Probably not, and this permits a penultimate conclusion about the sublime. The shock registered at its first moment--set by Mendelssohn, Kant and Schiller--may suit in some respects the Holocaust; but not the mixed sentiments, the moral security and physical distance without which it makes no sense to talk about the sublime. Memorialists close to the event itself (like Wiesel, Cohen, Fackenheim, Wyschogrod, Friedländer, even Lyotard) used the rhetoric of sublimity's first moment without sliding into the second. Their proximity to the event itself forestalled the danger of its memory bursting into something completely aesthetic. But for those living at a further historical remove, it's already too late simply to reiterate that language. The Holocaust and its first-memory already belong to the past, contained within a frame, already domesticated. Ironically, a rhetoric of sublimity will only increase that domestic character. With the passage of time, those who continue to use that rhetoric might find it easier to enjoy the pleasure and confidence that such language eventually and perhaps unwittingly generates.

The inability to find the right words marks the memoirs of Primo Levi and other survivors. Charlotte Delbo describes that period right after returning from Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. It "was almost impossible ... to explain with words what was happening in that period of time when there were no words."38 I would like to emphasize and respect the words "that period of time." Delbo, Fackenheim, Cohen, Lyotard and others belonged to a generation that could state: "This case does not exist. It cannot be signified."39 But this truth has already begun to wear. As Geoffrey Hartman notes against Lyotard, "the after-shocks are measurable; we are deep into the process of creating new instruments to record and express what happened."40 The ubiquity of these instruments and the study of these historical and literary contexts subvert the rhetorical force of Kristeva's reference to a "massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness." The Holocaust may have once constituted a differend, but no longer.

I would not dare to claim anything about the Holocaust-itself and how it struck those who directly suffered it. Needless to say, it appeared uncanny (unheimlich) to that generation of scholars, artists and critics who first sought to recall its memory after the fact. It may, in fact, forever remain impervious to the human understanding. But uncanny is no longer the right word. It is too relative and historically contingent. Consider the definition of uncanny rejected by Freud and cited by Friedländer in his own study of the Holocaust. According to this interpretation, the uncanny refers to the inability to distinguish animate from inanimate, human from inhuman. Friedländer used it to characterize the mechanical nonhuman character of Nazi killers and of Musselmänner approaching the state of automatons.41 However, I cannot help but suspect that people today have since come to feel perfectly at home with more benign blendings of the human and inhuman--for example, the interface between the human body and medical technologies, between the human eye and ear and the instruments of mechanical-digital reproduction. The same goes for Holocaust-memory, albeit with greater difficulty; it now constitutes a familiar room in a contemporary mental architecture.

This late, after so many memoirs and testimonies, historical and philosophical studies, novels and movies, icons and images, the Holocaust no longer signifies something uncanny. The first shock that it once registered has itself now become its own memory, to be preserved and respected as such. That shock still speaks to the Holocaust and its immediate impact: its sudden immensity, the inability to believe that such things happen. In contrast, the second generation of Holocaust-memory cuts more dully as images, if not the reality, of Auschwitz loom a little less large and a little more familiar. This uncomfortable at-homeness has given critics like Bernstein the torque around which to reexamine Holocaust-memory. Auschwitz retains its power to unsettle and disturb human culture; not because its image assumes absolute presence, but because it did not have to be. Bernstein argues against the notion suggested by Kristeva and Lyotard that only catastrophe yields truth. Instead, he calls for an ethics that attends to the prosaic details of particular cases.42 LaCapra has also warned against the "routinization of excess and the absolutization of trauma" and its yield of "self-reflexive art and self-dramatizing criticism."43

Naive

It is not my point to draw too strict an intergenerational line separating first-generation Holocaust-memory from the work of critics like Bernstein and LaCapra. Levi and Lanzmann remain a perfect case in point. Contra Bernstein and LaCapra, they describe the Holocaust in terms of its incommensurability with ordinary, everyday language. In this Levi and Lanzmann resemble modernists privileging poetic language over against crude canons of instrumental language and mimetic representation. On the other hand, both Levi and Lanzmann show an artfully studied realist style. That is why Hayden White upholds Levi--not the avatars of twentieth-century modernism like Pound, Joyce or Kafka--to contrast nineteenth-century versus modern versions of realism. It is Levi who helped White reflect upon a "new form of historical reality, a reality that included, among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects, the phenomena of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide."44 White cites the humility and restraint with which Levi describes the story of a particular atom of carbon in The Periodic Table. Indeed, this very turn to "particular atoms" suggests an important move away from sublimity and its constituent members (incomprehensibility, unspeakability, tremendum, abyss). In the process, it turns Holocaust-memory to contemporary versions of the real that resonate with that style Mendelssohn and Schiller called "naive."

To the best of my knowledge, few critics writing about the Holocaust and its memory would have us return to positivistic and crudely mimetic notions of language, narrative and truth. Who could afford to appear so naive? From the perspective of philosophy, Wyschogrod has rejected the simplistic notion of narrative associated with Ranke that pretends to render events "as they really happened."45 Langer, like so many other recent critics, rejects the "Chronological sequence ... [leading through] liberation, to marriage, family, career [that] cheers only the naive audience."46 Neither notes the following irony that inflects their own work. Realism has lost its naiveté and naiveté was never real. That is to say: the return to the real that they themselves exhibit speaks more to the "hyper-real" than to realism per se; and "naiveté" was never quite so naive as the word itself implies. In the classical aesthetic tradition, naive style assumed less pejorative meanings that suit it to Holocaust-memory.

In Enlightenment aesthetic theory, "naive" refers to simplicity, but even more importantly, to the illusion of simplicity and affective reserve. To be sure, Mendelssohn identified the naive with beautiful and noble sentiment and conception--two characteristics that do not jibe with the Holocaust. Holocaust-memory nonetheless has often depended on what he called the "simple sign."47 Consider Schiller's observation in "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." Naive poets overlook artificial and affected relations and attend to the object's simple nature; not because it makes one feel good but merely for the object's own sake. Nature (i.e. the object) is here said to contrast with art and puts it to shame.48 But note the examples of politicians, women and geniuses for whom the "naive" has less to do with naiveté and more to do with the illusion of being so. The subject matter only appears to take complete possession of the naive poet.49 Without moralizing sentiment. Take for instance Schiller's first reaction to Shakespeare. The author of Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth had at first appeared cold at precisely those moments of greatest pathos. He had allowed buffoons to disrupt the most heartrending scenes. Schiller eventually came to see that this "insensitivity" showed restraint where his own heart would have carried him away. Homer too was dry and matter-of-fact, a point disliked by many readers during Schiller's day. The naive poet shows control and command, whereas most readers want the Muses to rock them.50

We begin to find the same "naive" style in Holocaust-memory. For instance: the cold and seemingly artless way Langer brutally rejects comforting rhetoric. Langer might reject the narratives that assuage the naive audience. But he shows himself to be "naive" in the technical sense observed by Schiller. Note how the very word appears in the following anecdote introducing his own method. In one interview, two survivors, a wife and husband, express loneliness and loss; but their daughter claims that they left her strength. Viewing this testimony, Langer recalls having said to himself: "'Wait a minute! Something's wrong here! Either someone's not listening, or someone's not telling the truth!' This was of course a naive response."51 In this passage, Langer pretends to be "naive," no less than the politicians, women and geniuses noted by Schiller. According to Schiller, "naive" art shames art. Langer also seeks to shame by pitilessly savaging any attempt to impose a patina of meaning and redemption upon testimonies that speak to the reality of loss, discontinuity, indignity, moral compromise and the tainted self. In doing so, Langer appears to attend to the sign itself, to the signs provided in the oral testimony of survivors. On the one hand, his own interpretive commentary proves no less stylized than the heroic rhetoric he rejects; on the other hand, it reveals his own "art" much less willingly. These two points in tandem speak to the power of his own commentary.

One might find similar "naiveté" on the part of other prominent figures in the post-Holocaust discourse, including Art Spiegelman's Maus and Lanzmann's Shoah. Both present the illusion of being naive, cold and cruel. In Maus, the "childlike" medium of the cartoon shapes the memory of trauma. This speaks directly to Schiller's relating naive style to children and lost childhood. Note too the absence of raw appeals to moral sentiment. Vladek and his suffering assume domestic, not epic and heroic proportions. He and the members of his family both before and after the war remain small, imperfect figures, overtaken by events they cannot control. Neither Vladek's tale nor his example edifies or sublimates. Nor does Art, who candidly reveals his own impatience with a difficult father while recognizing the irony that his own fame rests on the suffering of others. For their part, critics were disturbed by Lanzmann's apparent cruelty. Shoah sustains an ironic interplay between Lanzmann's own intrusive and demanding voice, staged scenes and the testimonies of others. Lanzmann himself frequently takes on the character of the buffoons observed by Schiller in Shakespeare, somewhat crueler, but just as disingenuous. In particular, I refer to the scene in which he gets Polish peasants to express anti-Semitic sentiment; it makes "naive" the filmmaker's claim that he does not understand.

In current postmodern philosophy, Wyschogrod shows a similar turn to "simple signs." Her most recent An Ethics of Remembering is at once a postmodern theory of reference and a forward-looking meditation upon catastrophic suffering. It builds upon an a priori imperative of truth telling within contexts set by new technologies that shape and reshape the memory of historical cataclysm. The text forms around the "heterological historian." The heterological historian commits herself by promising to tell the truth about the Other; at the same time, the heterological historian accounts for the fact that the narrative character of historical writing undermines strictly realist views of representation. As such, Wyschogrod's own text shows that same "return to the real" that Foster finds in the contemporary art of Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and others. Put more exactly: they look toward the hyper-real.

Both Wyschogrod and the art discussed by Foster show a set of very important shifts away from the rhetoric of sublimity. First: Wyschogrod turns from the imperative voice to the very acts of predication that hot appeals to sublimity would seem to have rendered impossible. Demanding to be named, the Other obligates the historian who has promised to tell the truth about him. She must "offer up predicates that 'give him a countenance'." Second: the act of predication means shifting from sublime silence to naive speech. The historian must speak and must do so in the Other's name. Wyschogrod asks: "How is the historian to move from ineffability to speech?... Unsayability becomes in-discreet: the Saying, the ineffable, escapes so that what cannot be said bursts into language."52 Lastly: shifting to speech means shifting from the abstract empty-sign to the image. In sum, Wyschogrod has worked her way around the presence of Kant, the sublime, and abstract art to confront the veritable eruption of images theorized by Jean Baudrillard.

With the explosion of images, reference refers less to the real than to the hyper-real, to a simulacrum of images. Everything translates into images, into written or visual marks, including historical catastrophes. In the process, images lose all semblance to a clear point of origin and reference. Wyschogrod recognizes with Baudrillard this basic fact of technological society. New technologies and media render the relationship between the image and the real more and more tenuous. Indeed, Wyschogrod remains alert to the danger posed by turning the past into a set of images that refer more to themselves than to the events which they record.53

The proliferation of Holocaust images gives this process special urgency. Its sheer mass runs the risk that Holocaust-memory might someday come to resemble Sherman's photographic mock-ups. In early work, Sherman had set elaborate fakes in which she herself became the central character in scenes that look like they were taken from old movies. Later, she posed herself as the subject of photographs that mimic baroque and neoclassical portraiture. In more recent work, she simulates dead body parts, bodies turned inside out. These images disrupt clear reference by playing upon the very mimetic and genre conventions that lend them a semblance of reality. As such, Sherman's work has highlighted the following critical problems. What remains real when every image enters into the simulacrum and becomes hyper-real? Are there rules by which to distinguish real from fake? Do the stories and images of suffering people displace the suffering that they represent when they enter into the simulacrum? Do they too begin to appear fake?

Wyschogrod has set two critical limits to the postmodern play posed by Sherman: those who operate the simulacrum must promise to (1) avoid the radically counterfactual and (2) respect physical pain.54 To predicate truth on a promise might strike one as hopelessly naive and even fragile, but that is precisely the point. Some imperative voice ("tell the truth," "make money," "cheer me up") always already generates every descriptive voice; even simulacral ones. One might follow Wyschogrod to note that the mixed sentiments cinematically set in Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful could never have happened; they replace physical pain and shame with cloying affect; their lighthearted playfulness violates any possible promise to tell the truth about the Holocaust. In contrast, Sherman's hyper-real mock-ups could very well have come from old movies or portraits; and they speak powerfully to abiding physical and psychological pain. Indeed, the imperative voice by which Wyschogrod interrupts simulacral play finds itself expressed by Foster, who notes that "the real, represented in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic." Foster knows that trauma and its memory disrupt the stability of the subject's identity. But he also notes how trauma "guarantees the subject.... [The] subject, however disturbed, rushes back as witness, testifier, survivor."55

The interruption of the simulacrum by those who operate it undermines narrative sequence and points to the force of commentary. It also returns Holocaust-memory to "naive" reference. For instance, Langer rejects the ease with which a continuous narrative occludes the radical ruptures setting Holocaust-memory apart from life before and after the Holocaust. Following White, Wyschogrod remains dissatisfied by the creation of "mere chronicles" that recount a flat, linear sequence of dated events. Friedländer, however, asserts that the role of commentary always already disrupts neat reference and closure. He therefore adopts a middle position between extreme versions of deconstruction and positivism. The one negates reference by radically opening it to simulacral play. The other reifies reference by closing its operation. Against both, Friedländer has commentary interfere with linear progression. Its intervention permits the play of alternative interpretations and allows one to question partial conclusions.56 The act of commentary thereby highlights the attention to contingencies that critics like Bernstein and LaCapra demand. For his part, Schiller had also noted the fools who "naively" interrupt Shakespeare's most heartrending scenes. Friedländer and Wyschogrod require the same. In Friedländer's view, commentators born after the event must risk entering their own foolishly small voices and so disrupt the massive narrative sequence whose truth Wyschogrod would have them promise to tell.

The more commentary, the more predicates and promises, the more distinct Holocaust-memory becomes. And as Baumgarten noted, conceptually "distinct" representations lose the more obviously poetic character that defines what he called "clear but confused" representations.57 Holocaust-memory demands "naive" style and "naive" reference, a style that yields representations that are more exacting and less obviously self-dramatizing than the ones provided by the rhetoric of sublimity. "Naiveté" suits the intersection of history, ethics and aesthetics as they take shape in memory and the technologies that generate it. It allows one to veer between the simulacral image and the real, between art and non-art, between art and an art-that-shames-art.

This veering informs the middle position that Foster takes between two alternative readings of Warhol and with which I end this discussion of Holocaust-memory. The first, and more regnant, suggests that the image in Warhol's work was purely simulacral; its referent demanded no real affect from the artist or the viewing public. The cool capacity for emotional distance and deadpan, one noted by critics like Roland Barthes and Baudrillard, seems to support this view. On the other hand, Foster cites scholars who argue that Warhol treated his subjects with genuine and touching affect: be it the Campbell's soup cans whose contents the artist ate for lunch everyday for twenty years, the suffering Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis or the victims of car wrecks. The reality of pain and death are said to underlie the glamorous and glib surface. By placing himself between these two interpretive camps, Foster offers a profoundly "naive" stance toward trauma and the ethics of remembering. Prolonged attention to the traumatic real yields images that are both affectless and affective and viewers who are neither integrated nor dissolved.58 The Holocaust and its memory demand no less: images and narrative that allow analytic reserve alongside deeply felt emotional and moral commitments; and a body-politic that respects the enormity of catastrophic suffering but resists the maudlin sentiment observed by Schiller, what Foster calls "the schizo intensities of the commodity sign," by which it is remembered.

Notes

1. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York, 1982), 193.

2. Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York, 1981), 1.

3. Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Achenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley, 1954), section 116 (original emphasis).

4. Ibid., section 43.

5. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 216-33.

6. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, 1997), 198 (original emphasis).

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987).

8. Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York, 1995), 46.

9. Ibid., 81 (original emphasis).

10. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 131-34.

11. Schiller, Essays, 68, 62.

12. Ibid., 59.

13. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991), 180.

14. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998), 118; and Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, 1993), 122.

15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 119, 129.

16. Schiller, Essays, 29-30 (original emphasis).

17. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 134, 137, 138.

18. Ibid., 146.

19. Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago, 1998), 63, 67.

20. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Strue (University Park, PA, 1968), 82, 86.

21. Ibid., 109-10.

22. Philippe Lacoue-Labarth and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY, 1988), 51.

23. Ibid., 121-22.

24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis, 1984); The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, 1991); The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1988).

25. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the "jews", trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990).

26. Lyotard, The Differend, 13.

27. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 88 (original emphasis).

28. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 25, 217 (original emphasis).

29. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, 1994), 179-89.

30. Ibid., 189-90.

31. Ibid., 238 (emphasis added).

32. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), 2.

33. Ibid., 180, cited in Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago, 1990), 250.

34. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 208, 210.

35. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), 17 (original emphasis).

36. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 210.

37. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 168.

38. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, 1995), 237.

39. Lyotard, The Differend, 13.

40. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1996), 1 (original emphasis).

41. Friedländer, Memory, History, 109-10.

42. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley, 1994), 91, 121.

43. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 111-13.

44. Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 52.

45. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 66.

46. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 140.

47. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 223.

48. Schiller, Essays, 186, 179-80.

49. Ibid., 190-91, 196.

50. Ibid., 197-200.

51. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, x.

52. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 13, xi, 141.

53. Ibid., 166. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York, 1983).

54. Ibid., 167-68, 180.

55. Foster, The Return of the Real, 166, 168.

56. Friedländer, History, Memory, 132.

57. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, sections 14-18.

58. Foster, The Return of the Real, 136.

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