Concentrationary Imaginaries

Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture

Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781350229556
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857739087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

Part 1
Thinking

1
Framing Horror

Adriana Cavarero

A decade and a half ago, at the incipit of the new millennium, what we could call the ‘Spirit of the time’ manifested its violent core by shocking the entire world with the spectacular magnitude of the Twin Towers collapse. ‘This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years’, Don DeLillo wrote in the Guardian on 22 December 2001.¹ In the same vein, Derrida claimed that ‘what is terrible about September 11, what remains “infinite” in this wound, is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it’, for our understanding or imagination, it is hard ‘to meaningfully attach any concept’.² Many years have passed, Ground Zero has become a symbolic place for mourning and commemoration, but the two sentences are still worth quoting not only because of their ability to express the feeling of inexplicability that, at the time, was perceived by ordinary people and many intellectuals, but also because they hint at an issue which is still crucial for political theory. To put it simply, the 9/11 catastrophe revealed the ineptitude of Western political vocabulary to conceptualize the distinctive form of human destruction spectacularly exhibited by the event, a form of radical violence, capable of breaking our frames of intelligibility, that cannot therefore be enlisted under the categories of terrorism and war. Yet, as is well known, the linguistic reaction of politics and the media took exactly this uncritical direction and spoke immediately of terrorism and war, either specifying the first as jihad terrorism and hyperterrorism, or denoting the second as war on terror and preventive war. This misleading nomenclature and its material consequences – thousands of civilians killed in various zones of the planet – could not, however, hide the real thing we were confronted with by the Twin Towers massacre and all of the carnages that followed; namely, the phenomenon of unilateral violence on defenceless people struck en masse and at random.

Speaking in terms of political theory, is it a new and unheard of phenomenon? Indeed, providing a straight answer to this question is not only very problematic but it also engages, directly, with the axiom of inexplicability, which the question itself presupposes. Yet, at least under Western eyes and in spite of the epochal specificity on which it is worth insisting, the phenomenon looks not completely new. In the Western tradition, notoriously, violence against the defenceless has a wide and atrocious gallery. Auschwitz, tortures, pogroms, genocides and other aberrations fit in the picture. Symptomatically, whatever their historical and geopolitical location might be, all of these infamous theatres of human destruction share a trait of perversion that escapes the political lexicon centred on the categories of ‘terror’ or ‘war’. Moreover, they threaten intelligibility as such. The question, in fact, far from simply regarding a problem of terminology, touches unsuspected chords. Namely, it interrogates ontology.

Speculating on this issue, in a book published after 9/11, I coined the term ‘horrorism’.³ Rooted in horror rather than terror, the term aims primarily at providing a conceptual framework for historical scenarios where unilateral violence is inflicted on defenceless victims. As a matter of fact, inasmuch as massacres of defenceless people, no matter if more or less intense depending on the diverse areas of the planet, are today a global phenomenon, they hint at an urgent need to reconceptualize our language, if not our imaginary, in order to name a modality of destruction which targets the human as human. As is worth repeating, to verbalize it in terms of war and terrorism is useless, equivocal and misleading. Instead of describing the atrocious reality of facts, the obsolete lexicon of modernity ends up in justifying/producing the carnage as an immanent mode of its functioning and engenders linguistic confusion. This confusion, to put it simply, grows essentially out of a basic mistake: war and terrorism, faithful to traditional nomenclature, persist in observing the scene of destruction from the perspective of the regular or irregular warrior. The scene we are now focusing on, however, is different. On the stage of human destruction, warriors are today even invisible. Defenceless victims, vulnerable people, civilians butchered at random are the ordinary protagonists here. If the new era demands that meaning and the semantic continuity of traditional frames of intelligibility ought to be abandoned, the perspective of the defenceless looks, thus, much more plausible than that of the warrior.

A brief focus on some significant data of the last century could be useful to focus attention on the issue. The First World War (1914–18) inaugurated the model of Total War, characterized by ‘the placing of civilians on the same level as military personnel, and the propensity to exterminate them without hesitation’.⁴ Among the victims of World War II (1939–45), civilians formed a substantial majority. The proportion of civilians killed in wars or conflict during the last decades of the twentieth century exceeded 90 per cent. As for the first decade of the new millennium, which 9/11 2001 symbolically inaugurated, the percentage was even higher. For example, in Afghanistan, where the so-called ‘terrorist attacks’ were reaching an average of 14 a day and killed more than thousands a year, the victims were prevalently civilians. Somewhere – perhaps too far from the Western door of perception – the massacre of the defenceless goes on, just now, on a regular basis. As for the past century, at which Western eyes can now look from a distance, according to scholars, ‘it has been calculated that, in round figures, those killed during the twentieth century in acts of mass violence numbered of two hundred millions’.⁵ The million Armenian citizens deported to their deaths in the desert deserve special mention, as do the almost 6 million dead among Jews in camps, ghettos and through direct shooting, as do the uncalculated millions of persons swallowed by the Stalinist gulags. One could add the victims of Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields and other numerous cases. On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to close the list without pronouncing names of sites such as Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, Hamburg and, obviously, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, do not the 3 million dead in the Vietnam War, the majority of them defenceless victims of napalm bombing, deserve a mention too? The list is, indeed, tragically infinite, and obviously it cannot but be arbitrary and incomplete.

It is not just a question of providing complete data and exact figures. The figures serve merely to emphasize how, in recent times, butchery and carnage are mainly directed at the civilian population. Intra-specific human violence, in late modernity and even more in the last few years, consists predominantly in the murder, unilateral and sometimes planned, of the defenceless. What is at stake, here, is not simply war and terror but the human condition of vulnerability perverted by the work of horror.

The term ‘horror’, on which the neologism horrorism is, of course, constructed, has a very interesting etymology. Derived from the Greek verb phrisso and the Latin horreo – both alluding to the phenomenon of ‘goose flesh’ or, more literally, of hair standing on end – it hints at the corporeal manifestation of repugnance for the dismembering of the human body. The mythical Medusa, the Gorgon, represents it powerfully. There is a freezing and paralyzing effect, in horror, which does not depend on the natural fear of death – as in the case of trembling in the experience of terror – but rather on disgust for an ontological crime that outrages the human condition of vulnerability. Disfigured by a violence that aims to undo the incarnate embodied uniqueness of every human being, the vulnerable is here on stage as an exemplary icon of the helpless victim. What I designate with the term horrorism has to do precisely with the undoing of this uniqueness. It consists in an ontological injury that turns unique beings into a mass of superfluous creatures whose ‘murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat’.⁶ This sentence, formulated by Hannah Arendt, refers to the inhuman condition experienced by the victims of the Nazi camp machine. As Arendt acutely underlines, in her seminal work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, in the concentration-extermination camp system, ‘suffering, of which there has always been too much on earth, is not the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake.’⁷ The scenario of the Lager is, in fact, characterized by an ‘unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, resentment, lust for power and cowardice’.⁸ It is ‘human nature’ itself, in other words, under attack. This is why horror comes dramatically to the fore and prevails over terror.

By working on this issue, Arendt makes clear the distinction, but also the perverse connection, between terror and horror by introducing the category of total terror. Terror, she notices, ‘as a means of frightening people into submission can appear in an extraordinary variety of forms and can be closely linked with a large number of political and party systems that have become familiar to us’.⁹ Terror, in brief, is a well-known political instrument employed by institutional regimes, revolutionary movements, small groups of conspirators and other agencies of power for purposes of intimidation. Political terror belongs, therefore, to the logic of means with respect to ends. It is execrable, but not incomprehensible. Yet, in totalitarian violence, this very logic is extraordinarily absent. Real totalitarian terror, Arendt writes, begins when ordinary violence is left behind and the system turns to a ‘terror [that] has lost its “purpose”’; that is, a terror which is ‘no longer the means to frighten people’.¹⁰ Arendt calls it total terror, a terror that is no longer strategic, because it has departed from the logic of means and ends, and appears, therefore, inexplicable. The inexplicable nestled in the ultimate nucleus of extreme horror comes thus to the fore. It is, in fact, precisely this surfacing of inexplicability that attests that the performance of totalitarian violence has already shifted from terror to horror. Although she is aware that the inexplicable cannot be resolved into any simple explanation, in order to ‘fac[e] up to … reality – whatever it may be’, Arendt tries to ‘comprehend’ the phenomenon by providing historical accounts and conceptual frames apt to describe it.¹¹

In so doing, she ponders, first of all, on the cases that exemplify the principle that ‘everything is permitted’. Arendt mentions wars of aggression, ‘massacre of hostile populations’, ‘extermination of native peoples’,¹² and the concentration camps – but not the death camps – the invention of which precedes the advent of totalitarianism. The task of comprehending total terror needs, however, a further step, a step that symptomatically compels Arendt to focus definitely on the concept of horror. In the totalitarian machine of extermination the principle that ‘everything is permitted’ is in fact substituted by the unprecedented principle that ‘everything is possible’. That it was possible to manipulate human nature, reducing men to absolutely superfluous beings, was something that only the infernal laboratory of the Lager could conceive of and execute. And it was precisely in that inferno that total terror – intended as terror that has lost its purpose – finally came to coincide with the extreme form of horror. Life in the camps was such, Arendt writes, that ‘its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death’.¹³ By erasing the essential discrimination between living and dying, horror breaks the border of ordinary violence and renders it inexplicable.

The topic of the ‘living dead’ is notoriously central in the immense literature on the concentration camps; it has become a tragic icon of the Auschwitz imaginary. Arendt remains, however, an original scholar in framing the topic from the point of view of ontology. Horror, for her, as it is worth repeating, has to do with the human condition as such. It consists in the perversion of a living and a dying that, in the Lager, are no longer such, because the product of this perversion is ‘a specimen of the animal-species man’¹⁴ in which the uniqueness of every human being – and hence the necessarily individual dimension of a life that concludes with death – has been annihilated. The destruction of uniqueness, she writes, ‘creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the moral person’.¹⁵ In the meticulous annihilating process, ‘many were the methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person’,¹⁶ Arendt notes. At the end, all that remained were ‘ghastly marionettes with human faces’,¹⁷ that, like the ‘miserable and sordid puppets’ described by Levi, had nothing more of the human about them.

The topic of the human and the not-human is a very delicate and complicated one on which to speculate. Moreover, to dwell on the scenario of concentrationary imaginary in order to ‘comprehend’ the horror displayed by the Twin Tower collapse and its violent aftermath is quite a risky move. What is here at stake, however, rather than the concentrationary imaginary as such, is the recent impact of an ‘excessive’ form of human destruction that, again, challenges our imagination. From this perspective, within the horizon of political theory, the phenomenon looks, therefore, old and new. On the one hand, to quote Arendt’s sentence again, it recalls the fact of an ontological injury that turns unique beings into a mass of superfluous creatures whose ‘murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat’.¹⁸ Yet, on the other hand, some crucial aspects of the violence of our time make it different. Namely, even if Arendt’s and Levi’s works on the Nazi Lager are extremely important in the effort to conceptualize the inexplicable nestled in horror, political theory is nowadays presented with task of framing horror within the specificity of its current and determinate manifestations.

There is a peculiar aspect, in the horrorism of our time, which is, in fact, worth stressing. In the theatre of contemporary violence it is above all randomness that fuels the mechanism of horror production. It is chance itself, in other words, which produces the impersonal status of the victim. After the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004, in which 192 people were killed and 1,800 wounded, an anonymous commuter wrote on the wall: ‘Todos ibamos en ese tren.’ Simple as it seems, the line has the merit of capturing the atrocious logic of the massacre: ‘all of us took that train’, it says – meaning: each of us, indifferently and casually, could be killed or wounded. This meaning, however, is not that simple or, at least, it uncovers the speculative urgency of two questions. On the one hand, it claims that the shocking impact of this kind of event cannot but turn the perception of our singular vulnerability into the awareness of a constitutive and shared human condition. By focusing precisely on this topic, Judith Butler, in her seminal book written after 9/11, Precarious Life, engages with the important task of ‘reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss’.¹⁹ Thus, as Butler’s position and other similar speculations attest, there is a way to react to the outrage to human vulnerability which does not consist of retaliation, violent revenge and war. On the other hand, the line on the Madrid station wall also testifies to the fact that it is not simply the vulnerable but rather the defenceless without qualities, interchangeable and random, who take the centre of the stage where the current specialists in unilateral violence perform. From this point of view, the English word ‘casualties’ fits the script perfectly. The term applies to various contexts, from tsunami to bombing, and it evokes a violence without specific targets, whose victims turn out to be, precisely, casual. The term ‘casual’ derives from the Latin ‘casus’, ‘case’, which hints at chance and randomness. In a hurricane, some die and some survive, randomly. Significantly enough, however, it is contemporary horrorism that makes the term ‘casualties’ correspond to its etymologically exact meaning. In this case, in fact, more than their death, ‘casual’ is what really gives the victims their paradigmatic status. Struck just because they are casual, the victims’ only value lies in this casualty, which makes them interchangeable and exemplary.

In this sense, if we persist in utilizing the old nomenclature of the warrior, although dripping with horror (indeed being its most notorious theatre), war can still count ...

Table of contents

• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface – Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation
• Introduction – A Concentrationary Imaginary?
• Part 1: Thinking
• Part 2: Desire
• Part 3: Camp
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Contributors