Sylvere Lotringer: The Art of Evil

[anna balint]

[Despite the cultural pessimism of Adorno's dictum ,No poetry after Auschwitz' , 
or statemenst such as 'no art about 9-11', there is a need not only to understand the 
human devastation, but obviously there is a need to represent this knowledge in the 
art forms as well... like usually. below an older text of Sylvere Lotringer. greetings, ab] 

http://www.thing.net/~fat/vol1no1/sylvere.htm


The Art of Evil
Sylvere Lotringer

Yet what a difference there is between the playful iconoclasm 
of modernists during WWI, and the anguish pervading the work 
of their immediate successors. The "dissonances of the age" 
had clearly grown in a world torn apart by competing social 
systems and strident ideological claims, with their cortege of 
wars, crises, collective hysteria and fanaticism. When such 
writers as Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Celine, and Simone 
Weil embodied "the passions and contradictions of European 
society," they imbibed the madness, violence, hatred and 
humiliation which were about to rock Western civilization, 
unleashing atrocities on an unprecedented scale. 

None of these writers were even aware of the Nazi genocide. 
Yet from the mid 1920's until well into the war their work seems 
to anticipate the Holocaust, responding to it from a distance, 
"like victims signaling through the flames" (Artaud).

Since WWII the genocide has been documented, and the 
series of decisions which culminated in the death camps have 
been gradually pieced together. Yet aspects of the Nazi horror 
which were intuited by it's literary prophets sometimes elude its 
historians: "For the Nuremberg laws," Pierre Vidal-Naquet 
recently remarked, "were still laws, as were those of Vichy, and 
the members of the Einsatzgruppen still saw the people they 
murdered in the terrifying face to face of torturer and victim. 
But the majority of the German inhabitants in Auschwitz never 
saw Jews and Gypsies die in the gas chambers."

The controversy raised a few years ago by a group of German 
historiographers arguing for the precedence of Bolshevik 
massacres is another example of the way in which historical 
research can banalize evil. Evoking Jacques Lanzmann's film, 
Vidal-Naquet concluded: "Between time lost and time regained
stands the artwork, and the test Shoah imposes on the historian 
is the obligation he finds himself to be at once a scholar and an 
artist, lest he irremediably forgoes a fraction of this truth he's 
looking for."

Since the need to bear witness was a powerful incentive for 
survival, many survivor's testimonies have come to light. But 
what of those "set apart from the rest of the world by an 
experience impossible to communicate" (David Rousset) "A kind 
of infinite, untransmittable knowledge" (Robert Anselme). Can 
one ever account for the unimaginable? "Unimaginable," 
Anselme bitterly comments, "a word that doesn't divide, doesn't 
restrict. The most convenient word."

Behind the unspeakable is an even deeper dread -- will they listen? 
In an Auschwitz dream, Primo Levi found himself at 
home with friendly people. He has "so many things to recount: 
but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow 
me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly 
of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. 
My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word... 
Why is the pain of everyday translated so constantly into 
our dreams, in the ever - repeated scene of the unlistened to story?"

It has often been said that the unique nature of the Holocaust 
"challenges our imagination with a nearly impossible task" 
(Lawrence Langer). "There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz," 
Maurice Blanchot asserted. And Adorno: "After Auschwitz there is no 
word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any 
right unless it underwent a transformation." I believe that these words
 -- these transformed fictional narratives -- exist, and that they already 
existed before Auschwitz. Artaud hallucinating his own death or Bataille 
his own dismemberment, Simone Weil embracing the abjection of 
assembly line work or Celine carried away by an insane racist rage -- 
these writers were not acting on their own either. By making the 
unimaginable their very subject, these artists provided us with that fraction 
of truth which scholars of the Holocaust are vainly seeking.

The intensity of these writers' affects is a far cry from "that detached and 
distant manner characteristic of the Lager... the underground art of 
economizing on everything, on breath, movement, even thoughts" that 
Primo Levi describes in his account of Auschwitz. Yet a case could be 
made that the writers were expressing, before the fact, the suffering of the 
"hollow men," making it, in Artaud's words, "knowable and approachable 
by a certain sensibility."

Susan Sontag asserted that Artaud's work "offers the greatest 
quantity of suffering in the history of literature. So drastic 
and pitiable are the descriptions he gives of his pain," she 
added, "that readers, overwhelmed, may be tempted to 
distance themselves by remembering that Artaud was crazy."  
That Artaud acted crazy is undeniable -- after all he was an 
actor. "I'm not as crazy as you think," he once wrote Louis 
Jouvet, which didn't prevent him from collapsing after a 
hallucinated voyage to Ireland. Georges Bataille aspired to 
madness whereas Celine was a natural and Simone Weil 
treaded the line between idiosyncrasy and madness. A holy 
folly seemed to haunt the four of them, but was it madness or 
haste? Were they aware how precious little time they had to 
create new myths as safeguards against the massive 
desymbolization of the culture, of which fascism was one 
disastrous product. Artaud's theatre of cruelty, Weil's immersion 
into a community of suffering, Bataille's obsession with wounds, 
Celine's demented warnings; all of these were modernist 
"vaccines" meant to build the immunities of the social body 
against the incoming threat. But the cures could be 
poisonous. When Celine stopped attributing evil to human nature, 
giving it a name and a race, his anti-Semitic pamphlets 
anticipated the final solution.

Jean-Paul Sartre called "Guilty," one of Bataille's wartime 
journals, a "martyr-essay," and indeed each of these writers 
experienced the turmoil and political fanaticism of their times, 
and the disintegration of their own being, as a "sacred 
crisis." They explored the limits of guilt and self-sacrifice. 
Simone Weil, who died in England in 1943 of self-imposed 
hunger, exemplifies their uncompromising, even fanatical stand. 
As early as 1933 she had warned against the "mystical 
exaltation" of the Nazis, whose ideology she considered 
an ersatz religion. Bataille ambiguously recognized them as the 
first serious threat to Christianity. In 1943, from the Rodez asylum, 
Artaud rightly hailed Hitler as the Anti-Christ.

In his "Genealogy," Nietzsche probed the origin of moral ideas, 
questioning the value of the notions of good and evil in 
"our sinister European civilization." Bataille followed suit, 
but warned his reader that he intended to show the opposition 
between good and evil "under another light." Yes, but which light? 
Nietzsche never treated morality as an "intimate" 
problem; nor did he put much faith in man's interior world, 
the breeding ground for that terrible sickness, bad conscience. 
Nietzsche's concern wasn't  for man's soul, but for the whole 
human species' chance of reaching "that peak of 
magnificence of which he is capable." Would Nietzsche have 
examined the question of ethics, not in terms of action, but 
as Bataille did, "in reference to being -- or beings"? In the first 
essay of the "Genealogy," Nietzsche dismissed in advance 
those "changelings" called subjects as mere linguistic fallacy. 
"There is no being," he wrote, "behind the doing, acting, 
becoming... the doing is everything." 

The other light by which Bataille explored the question of 
morality was therefore the light of inner experience. Yet Bataille 
didn't consider that radical shift a betrayal. "Nietzsche," he said, 
expressed an "extreme, unconditional human yearning... 
independent of moral goals or of serving god," but he couldn't 
always maintain himself at this summit. Although indifferent 
to all political stakes, he couldn't always reach beyond the stage 
of action which necessarily "suppresses our being 
entirely." Bataille, in short, offered to supplement Nietzsche's 
occasional failings by realizing within himself the 
consequences of Nietzsche's doctrine.

So far, Bataille wrote, morals had been leading from one point 
to the next, providing the goal and the itinerary. After 
Nietzsche, morality led nowhere. This realization could drive one 
to madness, anguish, ecstasy or dereliction, yet it 
constituted the supreme moral experience, "the disarming freedom 
of meaninglessness and an empty glory."

In March, 1944 Bataille presented a portion of his essay on 
Nietzsche, provocatively titled "Discussion on Sin," to an 
assembly of philosophers, some of them Christians like Gabriel 
Marcel. Also present were Jean Hippolyte and Jean-Paul 
Sartre, whom Bataille met there for the first time. "Why sin?" 
Hippolyte asked, noting a Christian ambiguity in Bataille's 
speech. Bataille admitted that by sin he meant 
"a condition experienced with great intensity."

"That changes everything," Sartre exclaimed. It did. 
Bataille reformulated the question of morality - in terms of what 
he considered the moral summit: sacrifice. The distinction between 
good and evil, operative in the context of vulgar morality, 
was inadequate to express intense experiences that rip beings 
apart. In Bataille's hands, these notions became nearly 
interchangeable, floating signifiers like flags of the communal 
energies and intensities liberated through calculated killing.

All societies are founded on collective crimes which are 
subsequently denied by their many beneficiaries. Complicity and 
denial are constitutive of morality: concern for utility is merely 
there to suture the wound. This was true for Christianity, 
which recognized evil generically, in light of redemption, but 
refused to acknowledge its presence at the heart of the 
religious experience. "There's in Christianity," Bataille argued, 
"a will not to be guilty, a will to locate guilt outside of the 
church, to find a transcendence to man in relation to guilt." 
This accounted for the Church's inability to deal with evil, 
except as a threat coming from the outside. Doing the Church 
justice "in total hostility," Bataille assumed guilt and anguish 
as his own, daring Christianity to experience Christ's sacrifice 
as the equivocal expression of evil. By the same token 
Bataille found himself occupying the very symbolic space the 
church had assigned to the Jews. Fear and anguish were 
Bataille's stigmata -- God's festering wounds.

The era was birthing a crisis far beyond the reach of any lone 
individual. Collective seizure. Epilepsy on a mass scale. 
"We are surrounded by whole countries of anaphylactic dolts," 
Celine wrote in 1933,  "the least little shock sends them 
into endless murderous convulsions." Saturated with ideology, 
the civilized unconscious kept running amok at the 
slightest touch, people throwing themselves en masse, 
insanely, blindly, amorously, avidly into death and destruction. 
"Unanimous sadism."

Rationality was not lacking. It was part of the disease. "When 
we are entirely moral the way our civilization understands it, 
desires it and soon will impose it, I believe that we will explode 
entirely as well, out of wickedness... Religious neuroses 
appears to be a form of evil, I have no doubt. But what is it really?" 
Nietzsche asked.  And what is religious neurosis on 
that scale? Like fascism itself, religion became bureaucracy, these 
may well be the symptoms of a crisis that we've never 
recovered from, just bypassed, forgotten, decodified, like everything 
else: the ultimate entry into the ahistoricity and hyper 
reality of late capitalist societies.

We've become so used to seeing open wounds on the mental 
screen that it may astonish us that Bataille and Artaud 
exhibited such wounds with a moral purpose. Artaud's gothic world 
of electroshocks and redeeming stigmata already 
belongs to another age, the humanistic era of death camps, 
death squads and deadly plagues. As Artaud himself 
foreshadowed in "To Have Done With the Judgment of God," 
we've learned how to manufacture death as well as life. 
Whether or not the culture can be cured of such an insidious 
sickness is uncertain. As Marcel Proust said of Swann's 
love, the disease is so much a part of our reality as to be utterly 
inoperable. It might be easier at this point to celebrate 
madness in our dead cultural heroes than to expose ourselves 
to their impossible truths.

FAT Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1
Editor-in-Chief Josephine Meckseper