1/0 – The Impossibility of Truth
"What if truth were monstrous? What if it were even monstrosity itself, the very condition, the very form, of everything monstrous, everything deformed? But, first of all, itself essentially deformed, monstrous in its very essence? What if there were within the very essence of truth something essentially other than truth, a divergence from nature within nature, true monstrosity? How could one then declare the truth—if it were monstrous? How could one even begin—as I have——to ask about a monstrous essence of truth? Would not the language of such declarations and qestions have to become monstrous in addressing—and in order to address—such truth? Would not the deformation of truth, the operation of its deformatives, engender a deforming of language? Would it not require a commencement of deformative discourse?..." Sallis, John. Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Indiana Univ Pr, 1993. P.29 "Deformatives : Essentially Other Than Truth" An event is related in Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah' film concerning a Sonderkommando who recognised a woman in the "undressing room" prior to the gas chamber (II?) at Auschwitz and told her she was about to die. The woman - panic stricken - proceeded to tell the others of their fate, but no one would listen to her. This drove her to hysteria and she began scratching at her face and acting crazily. The other victims shunned her and ignored her, even treating her with hostility as she begged them to believe her. She caused such disturbance that she was held back from her fate to be horribly tortured to reveal who it was who had told her 'the truth'. The Sonderkommando was identified by her and thrown alive into the crematoria. This incident confronts us with a 'hole' in our cognitive ability when confronted with this true horror of the Shoah. The truth has become 'monstrous' in this place, it is no longer desirable, wanted , wise or even possible. It must be shunned by 'rationality', it must be 'hidden' in a more 'comforting' lie as spun by the captors who reassured their victims with calming, soothing tones. Indeed it seems that the woman's blind panic was threatening both to inmates and captors alike, promoting 'fear' in both - a fear of the truth? The 'unthinkable' given voice in the truth proclamation of a mad woman, whose only hope was to testify - and the more she shouted the more mute truth became, until she turned on herself scratching her face as if she could somehow exorcise this demon of truth from herself. It is emotive, it is unthinkable, it is a remembrance of the 'final solution' in the collapse of morality...1/0. Georgio Agamben "Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the Archive. Zone Books, 1999." quotes Zelman Lewenthal:- "...a member of the Sonderkommando who entrusted his testimony to a few sheets of paper hurled under crematorium III, which came to light seventeen years after the liberation of Auschwitz. "Just as the events that took place there cannot be imagined by any human being," Levental writes in Yiddish, "so is it unimaginable that anyone could exactly recount how our experiences took place... we, the small group of obscure people who will not give historians much work to do." Lewenthal had it wrong at least on one point. There is no doubt that "the small group of obscure people'' ("obscure" here is to be understood in the literal sense as invisible, that which cannot be perceived) will continue to give historians work to do. The aporia [Ancient Greek: ἀπορία: "impasse, difficulty of passing, lack of resources, puzzlement] of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension..." 'Obscure people' who witness a monstrosity and find themselves in chains of the 'impossibility of truth' - in bearing witness they 'manifest' the 'monstrosity' in terms that avoid 'blind panic' - our ability to 'calmly' listen to Shoah testimony whether on film or in personal encounter should reveal to us our lack of true comprehension, we have to push it away as vigorously, and as cruely as those people did in the 'undressing room' - you are telling me truth, but it is too monstrous to be listened to - be silent and allow us to live! Agamben quotes eerily of the haunting of something 'everywhere' that now haunts our present:- "...it is possible that the trials (the twelve trials at Nuremberg, and the others that took place in and outside German borders, including those in Jerusalem in 1961 that ended with the hanging of Eichmann) are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz. Despite the necessity of the trials and despite their evident insufficiency (they involved only a few hundred people), they helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome. The judgments had been passed, the proofs of guilt definitively established. With the exception of occasional moments of lucidity, it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself, dragging it to its own ruin…” The confusion between law and morality and between theology and law has had illustrious victims. Hans Jonas, the philosopher and student of Heidegger who specialized in ethical problems, is one of them. In 1984, when he received the Lucas Award in Tubingen, he reflected on the question of Auschwitz by preparing for a new theodicy, asking, that is, how it was possible for God to tolerate Auschwitz. A theodicy is a trial that seeks to establish the responsibility not of men, but of God. Like all theodicies, Jonas's ends in an acquittal. The justification for the sentence is something like this: "The infinite (God) stripped himself completely, in the finite, of his omnipotence. Creating the world, God gave it His own fate and became powerless. Thus, having emptied himself entirely in the world, he no longer has anything to offer us; it is now man's turn to give. Man can do this by taking care that it never happens. or rarely happens, that God regrets his decision to have let the world be.'' The conciliatory vice of every theodicy is particularly clear here. Not only does this theodicy tell us nothing about Auschwitz, elther about its victims or executioners; it does not even manage to avoid a happy ending, Behind the powerlessness of God peeps the powerlessness of men, who continue to cry "May that never happen again' when it is clear that 'that" is, by now, everywhere..." Agamben op. cit. p.19-20 Agamben here notes our confrontation with the 'that' as 'that' which is now everywhere and shows us the paradigmatic cut that the 'Final Solution' enacted on our culture. It turned 'truth' into a 'symptom' or if you like a 'neurosis', producing a 'hole' in the psychic structure of humanity that sought hedonistic solutions to bury the 'problem'. The truth was too monstrous to bear, and in our Freudian 'sublimation' [a mature type of defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior] it becomes 'impossible to bear' and eventually - simply ‘impossible’ - the creation of a 'doubt culture' where all truth is 'up for grabs' and very little sense or comfort is available, where our only option is not scratching our face but painting it, or feeding it! Even panic is eradicated as our governmental systems assure us that it will be all right, everything is under control we are here to help you! The economic system enslaves us easily into entering their 'undressing rooms' of debt because they promise us hedonistic heaven in return, and since the creation of the 'impossibility of truth' we have no reference points to judge them by - the world has become the camp - the only 'outside' inhabited by terrorists, criminals, the insane – and perhaps the ‘Jews’ themselves! If you think this is ‘stretching a point’ or pushing the issue too far consider this final quote in Agamben[himself quoting Primo Levi] op.cit. P25. Maybe it will conjure up this nightmare of post ‘1/0’ by analogy far better than I ever can:- “…[Promo] Levi recalls that a witness, Miklos Nyszli, one of the very few who survived the last "special team'' of Auschwitz, recounted that during a "work” break he took part in a soccer match between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkommando. "Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green" (Levi 1989: 55)…” That ‘game’ I would suggest is still going on today.
