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Article Excerpt
The classic example is the doorway that
continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater. --J. L. Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
In 1915, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Freud wrote a brief essay entitled, "Our Attitude Towards Death," in which he confronted something that was definitively imposing itself in Europe: death as a daily experience. His tone is conclusive and urgent: "Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it" (47). Prior to the war, Freud believes, fiction had constituted a different mode of relation to death, a place of compensation in which "the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us" (46). In fiction, "we find the many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero" (46-7). Since 1914, however, the war began to break down the profile of European culture, establishing a different relation to death:
People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance. (47)
What is interesting about this brief essay is that, for Freud, the opposition between fiction and death finds its content in the experience of the war. The extreme experience of the time consists in realizing that "People really die." The factum of war put into question a certain relation between fiction and death sustained by an attitude which had not previously considered war--" the accumulation of deaths"--as a relevant psychic fact. Fiction therefore fails precisely when death is manifested as a brutal occurrence exceeding the limits of representation out of which the "I" had formerly related to the death of the other. In Freud's essay war thus inaugurates a field of reflection on death, but one which must exclude fiction in order to preserve the "truth" of that event. Death takes a step beyond fiction, thereby establishing the structure of representation through which a generation in war would contemplate itself.
For Freud, the event of the war had removed the structure of social representation from his generation: death had become a common, accumulative fact, but at the same time something whose unimaginable limit had never before been registered. Twenty-five years after "Our Attitude Towards Death" was published, the Second World War brought yet another horizon to death, introducing concentration camps, gas chambers and the atomic bomb as some of the new referents in which unimaginable death found a place in the world. This time, not only would "the accumulation of deaths" make visible the opposition between fiction and death--between representation and fact--but it would establish a limit to the modern comprehension of the world, since the very notion of "accumulation" had its foundation in the technical rationality by which knowledge itself operates. The criticism of the notion of progress developed by Walter Benjamin, for example--"this storm" which prevents the angel of history from "awakening the dead" (257)--configured a field of reflection on catastrophe as the real instance delimiting the conditions of possibility of thought itself. The generation which lived "in rooms that have never been touched by death" (94) quickly had to confront a world in which death occurred as something inapprehensible and yet incontestably real, both familiar and unfamiliar: death as the uncanny. That generation--Freud, Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas, Benjamin, Adorno and many others--saw perish the very intellectual field in which it had been formed. Its members were witnesses to an instant in which thought was exceeded by the factum of death: the catastrophe confronted by this generation was the fact of death beyond thought. As never before, death demonstrated the fragility in which the world now found itself. As Benjamin wrote:
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84)
Concentration camps, crematoria, the technical sophistication in the organization of the Holocaust, all forced a generation to think its own conditions of possibility, which involved generating thought around this unspeakable factum of death which took place in the world at the same time that it subtracted itself from that world. According to Giorgio Agamben, "the ambiguity of our culture's relation to death reaches its paroxysm after Auschwitz" (80) due to the inauguration of a "biopolitical space" through which the constitutive difference between death and life would find a paradoxical dimension. Whereas for Freud, the rupture between fiction and death made life once again "interesting," giving it "once more [...] its full significance," Agamben identifies Auschwitz as the place where a new administration of that difference between life and death makes its appearance: "an unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics" (83). It is out of this tension between life and death, Agamben asserts, that Theodor Adorno's celebrated phrase--"After Auschwitz one cannot write poetry"--becomes legible (Agamben 80). The Holocaust produced a rupture between representation and death, thereby delimiting the space of comprehension through which an entire generation had reflected. The horror of death brings to completion the process of secularization--the desacralization of life--in the West, as death becomes an artifact of specialized technical organization, occurring as an accelerated productive process: the massive production of corpses.
As Maurice Blanchot observed: "knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the horror of knowledge" (82), to the extent that the very state of thought of Auschwitz--thought of the limit--maintains a secret complicity with catastrophe. There will be no poetry, certainly, because, henceforth there will be "a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction. Let us not forget this" (Blanchot 83). Nonetheless, a new figure will appear at the very heart of the crisis between representation and death: the witness. The witness of the Holocaust is the survivor of an event which put catastrophe beyond the field of the imaginable, thereby constituting the final vestige of that event. The witness is obliged to speak of what only occurred for him or her, in circumstances in which that singularity was exposed to a limitless threat. The one who bears witness to horror must therefore stand in relation to that without which there is no relation: an act which consists of producing the very conditions of possibility of one's own speech, but at the interior of a representational universe which death has surpassed.
This essay will seek to thematize the relation between fiction and death, taking the witness as the only one capable of crossing that aporia to which contemporary thought owes itself: the experience of catastrophe as the catastrophe of thought. Such a task would involve linking death and fiction from a place which only the witness has been able to access: "survival" as a limit experience, but this experience understood as...
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