The question is: How can a representation be ethical? It seems that in a representation, the question is aesthetical, yet some would argue that even a movement of a camera is an ethical act. Of course the ethical is not in the actual movement of the camera but in how the camera, by way of recording, represents reality. However, the aesthetical and ethical are never that far apart. Kant’s discussion of sublime is a good starting point for discussing The Holocaust since it is an event of immense proportions.
Sublime is contrasted with beautiful. The experience of beauty creates feelings of desire, calm and pleasure in the subject and it is always about the qualities of objects i.e. judgments of beauty refer to particular objects. Pleasure we get from the sublime is negative, it is about the quantity of events and objects; this experience is negative because of the gap between our faculties of reason and understanding (roughly perception). By way of reason, we can grasp the magnitude of the event but our senses are unable to come to terms with the greatness at hand. It is a very important point that the feeling of sublime can only occur when we are safe since it is only when we are safe we can contemplate on the event: feeling that it is impossible to resist it and at the same time find inside us a power that can be a match to it; and it is with this power that we find we come to consider ourselves as above nature, as moral subjects. Therefore sublime is a way more powerful feeling than beauty because in it we are faced with something inside us i.e. sublime does not refer to a particular object.
The connection between the Holocaust and the sublime is a matter of representation: is it possible to represent such horror? And the ethical question is whether to turn away from that representation or try anyway. I think everyone would agree that what we experience as the Holocaust can never come near to actually being there. There is impossibility here (echoed again in the impossibility of representing, writing or even thinking about death (which I think is the absolute sublime)) in the sense that no concept, image or text is able to stand for “the event”. So what to do?
Here we may compare Lyotard’s arguments about sublime against Kant’s. In Kant, subject is able to bridge the gap that sublime creates by way of its faculty of reason positing itself as a moral agent transcendent to nature. But its transcendence implies yet another gap between the phenomena (reality constructed by the faculties of the subject) and the noumena (as unknowable reality in itself). This gap mirrors the absence of an object in the feeling of sublime. In the face of such great events as earthquakes, genocide or death, we cannot point to an object to connect our reasoning with what we perceive. We are unable to describe that feeling in us, not because it is not represented in our mind because we feel the sublime, but there is no object for it. Lyotard argues that in the end, it is art that tries to reconcile this absence. Art is not about trying to capture this absolute object of the sublime (since there is none): there can be no representation for it. It is rather about finding ways to make indirect references to the impossibility of representing the sublime and the sublime object itself. Here is the concept of limit showing itself: there is a limit to our approach to the sublime. There are no final answers on some issues. Let us take the example of death. It is the end of everything, the point of no return, nothingness. All these lousy descriptions say nothing about death itself. But some existentialist philosopher may argue that it is the only question that matters. It is in our approach to the limit of the issue of death we are faced with the unspeakable, the objectless. The point is not that there can be no talk about death; but rather there can be no final talk about death in the sense that we can never find an objective anchor point in reality where the issue of death may be resolved definitely. There is a limit to human reason.
So here comes the ethical part: to give an image, an idea or a theory as the only possible answer to these questions is being fascist. Lyotard argues that these are totalizing systems. Death is and always will be beyond our senses and we have to come to terms with our limits on these issues. Inability to do so results in metanarratives. Lyotard’s argument is that the post-modern condition is one of skepticism towards metanarratives which rely on universal truths. This means that we don’t buy into pure hearted heroes, Marxism, progress or the universality of reason. What Lyotard proposes instead are petits récits: small scale narratives instead of meta-ones.
Spiegelman’s Maus is a perfect example of petits récits. It contains many small narratives, recursively (there is a comic inside which deals with Artie’s (a second-generation mouse) reaction to his mother’s suicide) and side-by-side. Moreover, it tells the story of the Jews as both victims and murderers: the story of the Jews called kappo who collaborated with Nazis. It succeeds in answering Lyotard’s criticisms and is also an example of the kind of narrative that we discussed in the class as showing us the grey instead of just black and white. My experience of reading Maus was incredible to say the least. After finishing the book I dreamt about Nazi Germany for three nights in a row. Schindler’s List is a Hollywood bore-fest compared to the elegant, intricate and thoughtful way that Spiegelman represents “the event”. Reading Maus is a unique experience. It is after all a black-and-white comic book which represents Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. There are maps, titles, instructions and little notes everywhere. It disarms you by its childish allegorical representations. Which is the very thing that shot in Kapo fails to do. Is there a reading of that shot that doesn’t scream: “a crime against humanity”?
That movement of camera is an attempt to point to the object of the sublime: the horror of the death, of concentration camps, of crimes against humanity. It is this act of pointing to a particular which does not exist - an object that is supposed to stand for the non-representable in the human experience - is the overstepping of the limit. It is not simple manipulation on the side of the director or rather it is not what Daney is criticizing. The tracking shot is a blunt representation of an ideology. It is purely ideological because as we have seen there is no object to point to in the case of the sublime. It is this pure reduction to the level of ideas which betrays the actual significance of The Holocaust.
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Excellent comment. We should discuss this in detail in class.
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