Regarding Images

The ceremonies which commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the nazi concentration camps, necessarily reopened the question of their impossible representation. The following is an interview in which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy discusses the profusion of images that accompanied these ceremonies.

Q: What does the current unfolding wave of images that attempt to show the "unimaginable" inspire in you?

JLN: Nothing in particular. It is normal that images proliferate: there is no reason to reject them, it is not a matter of being an iconoclast, but of interrogating, each time, the nature of the image: does it "saturate"? does it exhaust a meaning [sens], or not? A film like Schindler's List exhausts its meaning, Lanzmann's Shoah does not.

But this last is not the only film nor the only image possible. The question is that of an inscription in the image of an opening, of a non-completion, of an unimaginable. There are images for regards and images for voyeurs: the second want to see the invisible. That is pornography, a wanting-to-see [vouloir-voir] rather than a seeing, a wanting-to-enjoy-seeing [vouloir-jouir-de-voir]. Thus, the images published by Georges Didi-Huberman ( that certain have criticized ) do not pertain to voyeurism, but to dread [l'effroi] -- which is a form of regarding.

Q: In your book Au fond des images, you underlined a contradiction which "prohibits" [interdit] the representation of Auschwitz:  you say, if the reality of the camps is impossible to put into images, it is that they have themselves staged "the execution without remainder of representation". How is this to be understood?

JLN: The camps are a representation machine: the nazi gives himself there the spectacle of his omnipotence [toute-puissance] and of absolute forfeiture manufactured as its counter-image.

It is an "over-representation" [surrépresentation],  whose representation one cannot attempt without risking either embracing the movement of enjoyment [jouissance], or losing its very object. So one can say: the "over-representation" of the camp ( of which the arrival ramp and the place for morning roll-call are the symptomatic scenes ) is a representation that is full, saturated:  there, everything is said, everything is present, no line of flight can escape toward an absence more important than presence.  This is precisely what our greek-monotheistic thought designates as "idolatry". Nazism is absolute auto-idolatry.

Q: You wrote, "To show the most terrible images is always possible, but to show what kills all possibility of the image is impossible, except by again making the gesture of the murderer." [...] Would the pedagogy of memory come to replay the scene of the extermination?

JLN: Memory is to be treated like the image: either it solidifies and saturates a past in an atemporal "present", in which case it is sometimes a melancholy without recourse ( for the one who remembers), sometimes a pure abstraction ( for the very young who have no memory of it ); or it is an act, a mobilization of the living present, which is something else. This memory does without "memories" [souvenirs]: the test [épreuve] of the past informs the experience of the present. It is less a matter of saying "what horror!" than of demanding what has rendered it possible, and why "the belly is forever fertile, from where comes the impure beast [la bête immonde]" as Brecht writes.

Q: In the visual commemoration of the Shoah, should one suspect a will of setting in bronze ( in concrete or in film ) a barbarity presented as past, even though, as you say, "the world which made Auschwitz is always our world"...

JLN: Indeed, this world is the world of a broken history ( and not "finished"! [finie] ): the Germany and Europe of the 1930s felt the triumphant history of the Occident snap, its conquest of the world and knowledge, its mastery of progress. Auschwitz can be understood [entendu] as the furious cry of the will to go to the end of the rupture for "regenerating" everything. Regeneration rotted in the pit of piled up bones, but history has also remained suspended.

There is always the risk of wanting to commandeer [arraisonner] an ultimate destination, a supreme value...It is necessary [il faut] above all to refuse believing that we would have the "right" [raison].  It is necessary to take up "reason" itself as a work in progress [en chantier].  The terrible photos taken in the military prisons of Iraq, in their turn form saturated representations ( even in their undoubtedly accidental or marginal character, without the systematic will of the camps): any democrat can from one day to the next become the voyeur of a phantasmic omnipotence. Taking the photos is as important as the photographed acts: one wants to see oneself enjoying seeing the effect of its power [puissance]. That implies a formidable powerlessness [impuissance], which is not that of individuals, but of a culture, of a civilization, of a history -- ours. I do not want at all to infer a stigmatization -- of America or anybody -- which would make for a counterpart to what we condemn of the SS.

More than ever the question ought to be: how is that possible? It is not because there is a monster within man ( which was always true ), but because "man" no longer gives us the measure for anything. To what or by what must one measure man? Pascal wrote that "man infinitely passes man":  here is what an image must give a presentiment of. Omnipotence is a bad infinite, a caricature, a saturated image.
Le Monde, January 28, 2005. ( my translation. )

The interview en français.

Comments

[Matt]

God, that's wonderful. Thanks so much for translating.

This is a very interesting post!

It sounds like he's taking the passing-of-the-stick or stylus–nevermind, from Derrida very seriously, and already here. Not that this is a sporting event or anything.

[Alain]

Amie

I second Matt's comments. I was particularly struck toward the end with his allusion to Abu Grahb: "any democrat can from one day to the next become the voyeur of a phantasmic omnipotence." This sounds almost identical (at least in translation) to his thoughts on the Nazi who "gives himself there the spectacle of his omnipotence." And yet Nancy is quick to not equate the Nazis and the Americans. I wonder why? Does he want to preserve the uniquness of the Shoah?

The other comment that jumps out at me is that "Taking the photos is as important as the photographed acts: one wants to see oneself enjoying seeing the effect of its power [puissance]." Clearly the pleasure of seeing the infliction of cruelty is essential to what happened at Abu Grahb. But in what way does it imply "a formidable powerlessness [impuissance], which is not that of individuals, but of a culture, of a civilization, of a history -- ours?" Is it an expression of ressentment?

Again, thanks for the wonderful translations.

[Amie]

Thanks Matt and Alain.

Matt, don't get me started on JD and JLN...I'll never stop! But yes, Nancy has taken JD seriously for quite a while
http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/derrida1TM81.html

Alain, the interview does indeed state a relation between the nazi and the democrat, and also states that the shoah does not belong to a byegone past but rather belongs to "our" world and history. I'm afraid I don't quite understand your questions about "preserving the uniqueness of the Shoah" and "ressentment"?

[Alain]

Amie, I guess I only meant that Nancy seems to wants to be careful not to equate any other experience with the Shoah, that in some sense he wants to protect its specificity and uniqueness. And the ressentment comment was in regards to the expression of powerlessness - in relation to ABu Grahb and the photos. That there is a certain impotence that is revealed in the humiliation of someone else.