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The Morality of Representation - Coggle Diagram
The Morality of Representation
The limits of representation: conceptual framework
Notion that the Holocaust is an event that, because of its extreme nature, situates itself at, or beyond, the limits of representation. As such, it poses specific (and unique?) challenges to whoever tries to represent it in any form.
Theodor Adorno
'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.' - 1948
Coming from an Orthodox Marxist background - Nazism an extreme form of capitalism. We are still within the logic of capitalism. Anything that is published about the Holocaust is part of capitalism when it becomes sold and consumed by capitalism.
Quote extracted to mean that you cannot find aesthetic beauty from the Holocaust. Stripped down reading of this is that you can't represent it.
Years later 'a tortured man has a right to scream' realising that maybe he was wrong to write what he wrote.
Elie Wiesel
The Holocaust as 'literary inspiration' is a contradiction in terms. A novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka.
Writing in a review of column when the miniseries aired in the US
There is not space for artistic invention when engaging with the Holocaust. The only ones who could talk about the Holocaust are the survivors like himself.
George Steiner
The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason
Published in 1994. It can't be said let alone represented. Words fail when it comes to trying to represent these events.
Claude Lanzmann
The Holocaust is above all unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression. I deeply believe that there are some things that cannot and should not be represented.
French filmmaker of Shoah - 8 hour long documentary on the Holocaust
Came out in 1985. No archival footage. Refused to represent the Holocaust.
Imposing figure in the debate about Holocaust representation for many years. This position was central.
Radical position embraced by those who hold that this event is of such a kind as to escape the grasp of any language even to describe it and of any medium [...] to represent it, much less of any merely historical account adequately to explain it. (Hayden White)
Proliferation of Holocaust images: 'If the Holocaust as metaphor is part of our common language, who can control who speaks it?' (Helene Flanzbaum)
Jean-François Lyotard: the Holocaust was an earthquake that destroyed not only the typography but the seismographs as well, leaving us to wander dumbfounded in the ruins. French philosopher. His view of the Holocaust part of post-modernism. Part of his thinking was informed by the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
Geoffrey H. Hartman: there is an 'after' Auschwitz, without any sign that we are 'beyond' Auschwitz. American-Jewish religious scholar. Time has passed, but we have not yet fully come to terms with this event.
Scholars applied this view to artistic representations as well as to history-writing.
The limits of representation: history-writing
Raul Hilberg: 'Is writing footnotes after Auschwitz equally barbaric?' (for footnotes as in writing history). The horror is not there, if it cannot be represented is it bad to be put into history writing? Survivors are even the exception in the Holocaust.
'real' Holocaust not to be found in history books, which lack horror and 'experiential history'
Friedländer and LaCapra: attention to forms of historical narration (empathic unsettlement)
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997) and The Years of Extermination (2007). Really tries to do something different. Takes the debate on how to represent the Holocaust seriously. Trying to get the reader to be confused by what they are reading - can jump from something horrible to something very mundane.
The limits of representation.
Art: Kapò (Gillo Ponecorvo, 1960)
Jacques Rivette, 'De l'abjection' (Cahiers du cinema, 1961) - was a film maker in his own right
Kapò deserves 'nothing more than the deepest scorn' because this scene prioritises the aesthetic over the ethical or the true.
This way, it transforms the camp into a 'spectacle'
Realism in representation of camps always incomplete (i.e. immoral), reconstruction is grotesque, traditional approach to 'spectacle' voyeuristic and pornographic
Fundamentally took issue with the tracking shot of the suicide. This is what is making the camp into a spectacle.
This review is important in shaping the Holocaust debate in scholarly representation.
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
No historical reconstruction nor archival footage.
Retreat from representation
Bilderverbot and 'Fiction of the real'
Over time this approach has been criticised - you don't re-traumatise someone for the sake of telling their story.
The ultimate limit of representation: the gas chambers
To avoid the gas chambers is arguably to avoid the Holocaust. Yet the vast majority of films dealing with the extermination assert in one way or another that it is neither appropriate nor legitimate to represent what happened inside the gas chambers directly. - Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony, and the Holocaust (2008)
No one came out of the gas chambers alive, so there is no testimony from there
Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). Plays with the idea that it would show the gas chambers but then changes it to be showers (actual showers). But does show Jews who are going to be gassed. But doesn't show it.
Amen (Costa-Gravas, 2002). Story of Kurt Gerstein. Point where he is shown what happens in the gas chambers. We as viewers do not see what he sees - we see his reaction to seeing inside the gas chambers.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008). Film does enter the gas chambers. Crosses that threshold. Film that is less conscious of certain problems.