Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" by Saul Friedlander (1-May-1992) Paperback

by Saul Friedländer

Excellent Book

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published April 14, 1992

About the author

Saul Friedländer (Hebrew: שאול פרידלנדר) is an Israeli/French historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

• Introduction, Saul Friedlander
o The aim here is not to deal with a specific historical aspect of these events or with their particular expression in literature, in the arts, or in philosophy. The underlying assumption is that we are dealing with an event of a kind which demands global approach and a general reflection on the difficulties that are raised by its representation
o This project evokes some doubts which are not easily dispelled
 Can extermination be the object of theoretical discussions?
 Is it not unacceptable to debate formal and abstract issues in relation to this catastrophe?
o The basic problem we shall be dealing with has been on the minds of many since the very end of the war, and Adorno’s (often misunderstood) utterance about writing poetry after Auschwitz has turned into its best-known point of reference.
o We are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an “event at the limits”
o Hm. “most radical form of genocide,” hm…..
o There are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed.
o Seeking to establish some sort of “master-narrative,” without actually being able to define its necessary components.
o The dilemma we are identifying is not one of gross transgression. The intractable criterion seems to be kind of uneasiness.
 One cannot define exactly what is wrong with a certain representation of events, one senses some interpretation or representation is wrong.
o POSTMODERN PROBLEM: REPRESENTATION
 Lyotard takes Auschwitz as reference to demonstrate the impossibility of any single, integrated discourse about history and politics.
 The striving for totality is, for Lyotard, the very basis for the fascist enterprise.
o Historical knowledge, historical truth, framework of interpretation. No “objective,” outside criterion to establish one interpretation as more true than another.
 White: One must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another
 White’s “thick description” position is relativist
 Can lead to counterhistory.
o People try to combat this epistemological approach with plea for historical objectivity and truth informed by deeply ethical position and analytic categories.
o GInzberg has an extreme counterpetition to White’s relativism: even the voice of one single witness gives us some access to the domain of historical reality, allows us to get nearer to some historical truth.
o LaCapra searches for new categories of historical analysis. He calls into question any positivist approach: the historian has to rethink traditional categories when confronted with events such as the Holocaust
o Santner considers forms taken by “working through” or “acting out” in relation to Nazi past. Referring to Freud’s Beyond Pleasure Princ, suggests a form of coping with the mourning necessitated by the trauma of the Nazi experience through the ongoing retrieval of minor enactments of loss and the “redemption” of that past
• Germans prefer a “fetishization” of the narrative of the Nazi period: in other words, an avoidance of the pain through the choice of a risk-free reshaping of its most difficult sequences.
• Related to Habermas’ master-narrative about a special course
o [Summary of chapters cont.]
o Notwithstanding the importance one may attach to postmodern attempts at confronting what escapes, at least in part, established historical and artistic categories of representation, the equivocation of postmodernism concerning “Reality” and “truth”—that is, ultimately its fundamental relativism—confronts any discourse about Nazism and the Shoah with considerable difficulties.
• 2. White, Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth
o There is an inexpungeable relativity in every representation of historical phenomena. The relativity of the representation is a function of the language used to describe and thereby constitute past events as possible objects of explanation and understanding.
o I view this relation between historical storytelling and historical reality as mistaken or at best misconceived. Stories, like factual statements, are linguistic entities and belong to the order of discourse
o The question that arises wrt “historical emplotmnets” in a study of Naziism is
 Are there any limits on the kind of story that can be responsibly told about these phenomena? Can these e vents be responsibly employed in any of the modes, symbols, plot types, and genres our culture provides for “making sense” of such extreme events in our past?
 Or is Final Solution belonging to a special class of events, such that they must be viewed as manifesting only one story, as being employable in only one way, and as signifying only one kind of meaning?
o Emplotment DEF: various generic plot types that can be used to endow events with different kinds of meaning
o Are our representations one thing and the event itself another?
o The facts of the matter set limits on the kinds of stories that can be properly (veraciously and appropriately) told about them. The events themselves possess a “story” kind of form and a “plot” kind of meaning.
o Differences among competing narratives are differences among the “modes of emplotment”
o The type of emplotment provides pattern for scene and justifies the ignoring of events, agents, actions, patients that may inhabit a given scene
o Some argue “Hologaust as virtually unrepresentable in language.”
 escape the grasp of any language to describe it or any medium to represent it. “lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.”
o Lang argues it can be represented literally, not figuratively. The Holocaust is, quite apart from being a real event, an event that really happened, it is also a literal even, that is, an event the nature of which permits it to serve as a paradigm of the kind of event about which we can be permitted to speak only in a “literal” manner
 Figurative language not only turns or swerves away from literalness of expression, but also deflects attention from the states of affairs about which it pretends to speak
 Any figurative expression adds to the representation of the object to which it refers
• First, it adds itself (that is, the specific figure used) and the decision it presupposes (that is, the choice to use one figure rather than another).
• Figuration produces stylization, which directs attention to the author and his or her creative talent
• Next, figuration produces a “perspective” on the referent of the utterance, but in featuring one particular perspective it necessarily closes off others. Thus it reduces or obscures certain aspcts of events
• The kind of figuration needed to transform what would otherwise be only a chronicle of real events into a story at once personalizes (humanizes) and generalizes the agents and agencies involved in those events.
 Literary writing and the kind of historical writing that aspires to the status of literary writing are especially objectionable to Lang, because in them the figure of the author obtrudes itself between the thing to be represented and the representation of it.
 Lang calls Nazi genocide intrinsically anti-representational, not that they can’t be represented, but that they are paradigmatic of the kind of event that can be spoken about only in a factual and literalist manner.
 Derrida’s middle voice, expressing a certain intransitiveness, into the active and passive voice, constituted by a repression.
 Surveys modernist representation styles. These modes of representation may offer possibilities of representing the reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of realism could do.
• 3. Anderson, On Emplotment: Two Kinds of Ruins
o In The Content of the Form White has argued that narrativity always involves moralization.
• 4. Narrative, Counternarrative,
o Narratives are historical in that they are not arbitrary, inasmuch as they are true, that is to say, historical. The ‘truth’ or authenticity of a historical narrative—if we strip off the subjective categories and points of view of the narrator—is, like the je ne said quoi of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theoreticians, or like Kant’s “intuition,” evasive, incapable of isolation, yet eer present, triggered—we do not know how—by “things in themselves” we cannot define except to say that they are, and are of necessity.
o “the mythopoeic intensity of the narrator.”
o Whit’e Metahistory has had such a wide echo precisely because our choice of a “form of narrative” dictates the facts we select to fit into it.
o Let me explicate what I mean by reality. “The real” forces itself upon us and yet is only that which we make relevant, manipulate.
o Counterhistory
 A specific genre of history written since antiquity. Function is polemical. Method is systematic exploitation of the adversary’s most trusted sources against their grain. Aim is distortion of the adversary’s self-image, his identity, through the deconstruction of his memory
 E.g. Manetho’s hostile inverted reading of Biblical passages
• Canaan conquest by force replaced with commonwealth of former lepers and outcasts, a rebellious spirit nourished by the hatred of the human race.
 Naziism as a counterhistory, revisionist literature.
• 6. Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments
o Hayden White has so often scandalized his fellow historians that I hope he will find it refreshing to be reproached for not being scandalous enough.
o In his anxiety to avoid inclusion I nthe ranks of those who argue for a kind of relativistic “anything goes” which might provide ammunition for revisionist skeptics about the existence of the Holocaust, he undercuts what is most powerful in his celebrated critique of naïve historical realism.
o White concludes that written history is inevitably beholden to formal reconstructions that cannot be perfectly mapped onto the historical reality they purport to represent
o Stages of representation
 1. Facts or events, the ‘content’ of history as it happened. Prelinguistic phenomena “PRENARRATED HISTORY”
 2. These become stuff of stories, which are emplotted narrations about their significance
 3. Interpretations about the meaning of these stories is a higher level of historical analysis.
 (HE collapses 1and 2 her—stories are always already meaningful interpretations)
o Author here is arguing that the factual record is not entirely prior to its linguistic mediation or indeed its figural signification
o There is no historical content that is linguistically unmediated and utterly bereft of meaning.
o NICE SUMMARY OF WHTIE ABOVE ^
• Eric L. Santner, “History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma.”
o Stories one tells about the past are at some level determined by the present social, psychological, and political needs of the teller and his or her audience
o “Narrative fetishism:” the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place. The use of narrative as fetish may be contrasted with that rather different mode of symbolic behavior that Freud called the “work of mourning.” Both narrative fetishism and mourning are responses to loss, to a past that refuses to go away due to its traumatic impact.
 The work of mourning is a process of elaborating and integrating the reality of loss or traumatic shock by remembering and repeating it in symbolically and dialogically mediated doses; it is a process of translating, troping, and figuring loss and may “Eecompass a relation between language and silence that is in some sense ritualized.”
 Narrative fetishism, by contrast, is the way an inability or refusal to mourn employs traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere.
 Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one’s self-identity under ‘posttraumatic conditions, in narrative fetishism, the “post” is indefinitely postponed
o A traumatic event is by definition one that implicate the historian in labors of psychic mastery. Any historical account of such an event will, in other words, include, explicitly or implicitly, an elaboration of what might be called the historian’s own context of survivorship.
o Back to Freud on mourning
 fort/da: mastering grief over separation from mother by staging performance of disappearance and return with props that Winnicott would call transitional objects.
 Child is translating his fragmented narcissism (which might otherwise pose a psychotic risk—the risk of psychological disintegration) into formalized rhythms of symbolic behavior. Substitutive figures at a remove from what one might call their “transcendental signifier”
 HE is dosing out a negative—thanatotic—elemnt as a strategy of mastering a real and traumatic loss. This is a fundamentally homeopathic procedure.
 In the fortlda game it is the rhythmic manipulation of signifiers and figures, objects and syllables instituting an absence, that serves as the poison that cures
o Freud on oneiric repetition compulsion
 an effort to recuperate, in the controlled context of symbolic behavior, the Angstbereittcliaft or readiness to feel anxiety , absent during the initial shock or loss
 The absence of appropriate affect—anxiety—rather than loss per se is what leads to traumatization.
 Fetishism, as I am using the term here, is, by contrast, a strategy whereby one seeks voluntaristically to reinstate the pleasure principle without addressing and working through those other tasks which, as Freud insists, "must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin." Far from providing a symbolic space for the recuperation of anxiety, narrative fetishism directly or indirectly offers reassurances that there was no need for anxiety in the first place.
o Narrative fetish assures that the regime of the pleasure principle was never in any real danger
• The Dialects of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification, Peter Haidu
o The major theoretical issues that attend the question of Holocaust historiography arise: the exceptlonality of the event, Its represeotability , its (un)speakability, indeed, its very (in)oomprehensibility.
o This inconclusive discourse perforce refers to an absent text which cannot be presentified.
o Discourse on silence, a specific silence in an extraordinary historical situation, entails the issues of signification put forward by contemporary theory
o Headass chapter
o Silence is the antiworld of speech, and at least as polyvalent, constative, and fragile
o Silence is enfolded in its opposite, in language. silence is simultaneously the contrary of language and an integral part of it. Silence is the necessary discrepancy of language with itself, its constitutive alterity
o The traditional disciplines of language have amply recognized the
o interdependence of the said and the unsaid. Structures like elision, irony in its multiple forms, apostrophe, apophasis, and praeterition not only recognize the existence of the unsaid but define linguistic structures of representation which ground the said in the unsaid, making the unsaid the essential element of discourse
o The semantic content of these rhetorical forms of structured silence
o The writer’s thrist for specificity—which certainly includes the historian’s desire to ‘get it right’—runs into the paradoxical functioning of his medium
o No encounter between the self and other is ahistorical. Immediacy per se does not walk up to us. Immediacy per se is an allegorical figure, reductively abstracted from real encounters.
o The reference to negative theology at the beginning of my remarks was not accidental. The impossibility that attends the representations of the Event, as well as its designation as a unique event with a special status of “Exceptionality,” looks very much like the initial stage of an institutionalization of the divine. Let this incipient sacralization of the Event hang fire for a bit.
o An admittedly atavistic reason to hesitate at the notion of "unspeakability" is that it constitutes an acceptance, after the fact and after the deaths, of the unspeakability argued
o There ls another way of conceiving the issue of unspeakability , however, which may be more promising. fur the future. If lam correct, and the unhtimlich qualityofHitnmler's speech derives from conjoinIng our r.ecog!lition of his discourse as similar to our own38 with the terror that strikes us in the realization of what that discourse led t-0 in the narrative of history, then its "unspeakability" is less an inherent quality of the text thl!ll a product of our cog!litive relation to the Event and to its texts.
o HOW TO SAY SOMETHIGNS UNSPEAKABLE WITHOUT BUYING INTO IT
• The Representation of Limits Berel Lang
o There reference to the “limits of representation” in the title of this volume might seem to imply that the limits themselves are not representations.
o By definition there will be a difference between a representation and its object unrepresented, with the former adding to or altering the other.
o In this sense the opposite of representational is not abstract…but literal—the object as it is apart from being re-presented
o There is, furthermore, a tacit preposition attached to the concept of representation and its exemplifications. “represented as”
o Any representation, then, in addition to its manifest content, represents the exclusion of others. The latter appears not as a uniform phantom class, moreover, but with differing degrees of individuation which underscores the common factor of choice represented. No single representation, in effect, without the possibility of another.
o In “limits of representation” and “the representation of limits,” (op prefers latter phrase), limits are referred to as if given—as though…there could be no question that they exist.
o On the one hand, limits exist because they must. On the other hand, limits…are at most conventional and thus open to continuing, even limitless variation because they cannot be more than that: any specific representation, if not the act itself, is in these terms unnatural.
 Yet most representations of limits stands between those extremes.
 OP is examining the middle ground of the extremes.
o The representation of limits begins to shape the limits of representation.
o Relation of transgression and

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The “limits” of adequately and appropriately representing Nazism and the Final Solution are examined by the essays in this volume, beginning with Saul Friedlander’s introduction. The editor notes that the Holocaust is “an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits’” – it is an event that seems to exist beyond the realm of possibility; to write about such an event involves barriers not encountered by any other in history. Friedlander postulates that our ability to adequately represent the Holocaust is insufficient and yet boundless.

[Miss · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of essays on the topic of representing the holocaust and other terrible events in historiography. I must admit that Carlo Ginzburg's contribution made me quite upset. To liken Hayden White to Giovanni Gentile is really far-fetched. Still, a collection worth reading.