Against Trauma

Against Trauma One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante (Agamben)

After watching Frozen Time, Liquid Memories I made my way to my college library in Dublin to source a hardcopy of Serge Klarsfeld’s French Children of the Holocaust.1 Klarsfeld speaks eloquently at a commemoration in Paris in part two of Kujundzic’s film, “They Were Children”, about the Vel d’Hiv roundup in July 1942.

Described in subtitle as “the foremost French historian of the

Holocaust,” he recounts how Reinhard Heydrich visited Paris in May 1942, two months previous to the roundup, in order to instate General Carl Oberg as the new SS Chief of France and the supervisor of the final solution with the corroboration of the French police. After introducing Klarsfeld the film cuts to a shot of the cover of Klarsfeld’s book. The cover shows a copy of an identity card of a young child. The information is clear and concise and there is a monochrome image of a young girl with a striking, wide-eyed gaze holding up the number 413 elegantly rendered in chalk on a small blackboard. The identity card tells us the name of the girl, Anny-Yolande Horowitz. She was born in Strasbourg on June 2, 1933. Her address was 21, rue Rode, Bordeaux. The word JUIVE is also stamped in bright red bold ink over the words Carte d’identite. Apart from this, we are told she has blonde hair, blue eyes, and a rosy complexion and that she is of average height. Finally, in the top right of the image is Anny’s childish handwritten signature.

French Children of the Holocaust contains similar images and information on over 2,500 children (all under 18) as well as the names and addresses of the 11,400 children deported on convoys under the orders of the Vichy government in France to Nazi death camps. There are in all 2,503 photos in the English edition comprising a grand total of 1,881 pages. It is still incomplete. The book follows on from the earlier Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France ("The Memorial to Jews Deported from France") containing the names, addresses, convoy numbers and nationalities of the 76,000 French Auschwitz-bound Jews. French Children of the Holocaust is described by Klarsfeld in the preface to the English edition as a “collective gravestone... a book born of my obsession to be sure that these children will not be forgotten”.2 For Klarsfeld, as Thomas Laqueur put it in the London

Review Books, “God resides in the details” and the details are overwhelming. After twenty years of immense research the images and details are far less than the 11,400 that Klarsfeld admits he wished he had been able to obtain. Anny, we learn from the book, was interned in the Lalande camp near Tours, then transferred to Drancy. She was deported from there on September 11, 1942 on convoy number 31 to Auschwitz1

Birkenau, along with her mother Frieda and 7 year old sister Paulette. From every photo we glean the tragedy that awaits the innocent faces of the children of the Shoah and it is difficult to take on board how exactly one is affected by these or exactly how to react. In my own case twenty minutes was more than enough time. How difficult it is to look at these fresh faces and imaginatively pursue the visceral realities that was their lot. Perhaps the facts themselves are more than enough to tell the story of these children, which bears down heavily on a question of representation and reminds us of Adorno’s infamous statement concerning poetry after Auschwitz. Indeed, the question of testimony is always one of representation as Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel and a host of others have, each in their own way, taught us. The point is delicately echoed by Marcel Aron-Weltman who begins his speech “practically,” without invention, by describing how he will speak the memories of a 10 year old child before telling us the facts about his family and the roundup of Vel d’Hiv. The facts, we say, speak for themselves. There is no need to embellish or to invent. They are there, as plain as day. In a sense, all we have are these facts: Marcel’s mother, Sonia Naichouler, born 1910, Voronezh, Russia; Marcel’s father, Samuel Weltman, born 1901, Czestochowa, Poland; they met in Paris and married in May 1931. They had two children, Marcel, April 1932, and Jacqueline January 1, 1935. What God resides in these details? As always there is an ethical dilemma in our interpretations. The danger is that letting the facts speak for themselves affords us some distance from those all too human moments and from what Marcel refers to as the “unheard-of hope” that was unknownable to him or to his sister at the time their mother decides to let them be taken from her. The madness of that decision will never be known to Marcel or Jacqueline. The facts can allow us to say, on the one hand how horrible these are, how unsayable, how unthinkable, unimaginable. But on the other hand the facts may also give us a breathing space, a moment to remove ourselves from the gravitas of decisions and the realities they purport to reveal.

They may leave us distant, circumspect, or worse, indifferent; “men are

accomplices,” as George Steiner memorably put it, “to that which leaves them indifferent”.3 Something of the same can be said for Klarsfeld’s book. Looking at all those faces on page after page is an extraordinary experience. The tendency is to drift, to flick through the thousands of images without fully taking in the gravity, without acknowledging the singularity of each and every other child (how could we?). Our tendency is to treat it like a book, any other book, which it is not. It becomes an emotionally shattering experience, distantly disturbing, not because we see how horrible things are, but how quickly our emotions move from despair through blank acceptance of the fact that 2

these are the lonely representatives of a vast unaccountable genocide that happened in the past. Readers of Klarsfeld’s book and of Kujundzic’s film are likewise drawn into spectacles of crises, traumatisms, despair, making the viewer the third aspect in the testimonial triangle of perpetrator, victim, witness beyond the event. Readers of these representations are obliged to respond to what is left unsaid, to what cannot be said anymore as much as what is there to be resaid. They are obliged to speak of the unheard of, of a memory that is not simply past or passing or to come. “Memory,” says Derrida, “is the name of what is no longer only a mental ‘capacity’ oriented toward one of the three modes in the present, the past present, which could be dissociated from the present present and the future present. Memory projects itself toward the future, and it constitutes the presence of the present”.4 Trauma and representation (re-present-ation) are always the issue in Holocaust interpretation. So let me be plain: one must never say that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, that it is unsayable, that we must simply pass over it in silence. To say this is a kind of complicit forgetting, an easy way out and a promotion of the events therein to a kind of negative theology.5 It is a way of shirking one’s responsibility to deal with the troubling remnants that those events bequeath and call upon us, individually, to unravel, elucidate and portray every day – every day again. We cannot nor should not try to awake from this nightmare. The problem, as Norman Spaulding points out in a recent perceptive journal article in Critical Inquiry, is that “in seeking to do justice to the past we long for the very closure of judgement, along with its too-tidy hierarchical ordering of authoritative evidence, that memories of irreparable injury can never be expected to provide”.6 A responsible response calls upon us to vocalise not just the evidentiary data, the epistemological criteria, the sullen fact, the accountability of the perpetrator, or the culpability of all those somnolent spectators. A responsible response calls upon us to concern ourselves with, in Spaulding’s words, “exposing the respects in which resistance is triggered by the enormity of what the memory work reveals”.7 Doing this is not easy. It is a kind of difficult knowledge, a knowledge that one finds in and through the difficulty experienced in the act of memory, the activation of memories. It is, indeed, a liquid art, an art of fluidity, of flowing back and forth, or becoming and unbecoming, finding and letting go, of drowning and drifting between futures and pasts. These memories carry us as much as we carry them. Trigger Culture Before returning to what is unheard-of in Frozen Time, Liquid Memories I want to examine a major controversy concerning issues of trauma and responsibility that have just come to light. A recent internet blog (June 5, 2014) by Jack Halberstam resulted in a surge of polarising responses from queer communities, sociologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers.8 Hundreds of comments concerning issues 3

of trauma, some more sensitive than others, quickly poured in, as did Facebook messages and Tweets. Comments on how trauma is investigated, studied, spoken of, contemporaneously rendered in fractious discourses within gender studies and queer politics reflected a gross disparity between commentators and a wide spectrum of response. In his essay “You are Triggering Me! The Neo-liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma” Halberstam examines Monty Python’s comedy films Life of Brian and

The Holy Grail. His argument that those films, while banned in some countries upon their original releases in 1975 and 1979 respectively, could not possibly be released in cinemas now suggests that their wacky, outrageously irreligious satire, stereotype debunking, crass sexual silliness and often pointless repetition is a litmus test for the manner in which communities have now become stultified in their thinking about trauma. A cult of hurt has permeated academic discursivity in the past several decades, the argument goes, so pervasively that scholars are now unsubtly attuned to predicting and avoiding “triggering” terms or phrases that might result in adverse emotional responses from their audiences. Gone are slang derivatives, caricatures, ironic understatements, humorous deflations and, “God forbid”, anything as satirically controversial as Monty Python. Scholars working within queer studies – and I would add much further afield – are now mired in a rhetoric of responsiveness without response, to play on an old Kantian expression, a rhetoric which, while circumnavigating the perilous seas of triggering expression, precludes them from engaging in meaningful critical discourse in the first place, from saying anything worth saying. What Halberstam sees as a cataclysmic change in the impetus of queer movements, can all too easily be seen as an acknowledgement that the revolution has come full circle and that what was once the freedom of so-called queer theory, its biting queer inventiveness (its queryness, if you like), its singularity and incisiveness and its refusal to settle into dogmatic slumber has become, in certain quarters, reified, empty, pointlessly self-perpetuating jargonese or, worse, obscene puerile hypersensitivity.

Radical discursive practices mobilised to undermine and subvert ideological

superstructures have themselves become over-arching hegemonic ideological modalities. For anyone remotely sensitive to such changes will know the same can be said of certain factions of postcolonialism, new historicism, poststructuralism, ecocriticism and so on. Again, when it comes to factions, Monty Python can teach us quite a lot, as the eponymous Brian discovers when he attempts to join the PFJ (People’s Front of Judea):

“Are you the Judean People’s Front?” 4

“Fuck off! Judean People’s Front? We’re the People’s Front of Judea. Judean People’s Front. Cawk!”9

Notwithstanding the malaise Halberstam quite rightly sees consuming such scholarship of late, her point concerning knee-jerky reactions to modes of representation deemed inappropriate for adult audiences, the hierarchies of woundedness that compel students and scholars to erupt at conferences and in classrooms in a macabre one-upmanship, she hits on a crucial point that I want to argue is essential to a scholarly rethinking of trauma studies today and what it means to be a responsible reader. First, here is how Halberstam explains “triggering”:

Claims about being triggered work off literalist notions of emotional pain and cast traumatic events as barely buried hurt that can easily resurface in relation to any kind of representation or association that resembles or even merely represents the theme of the original painful experience. And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud’s mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark. Where once we saw traumatic recall as a set of enigmatic symptoms moving through the body, now people reduce the resurfacing of a painful memory to the catch all term of “trigger,” imagining that emotional pain is somehow similar to a pulled muscle –as something that hurts whenever it is deployed, and as an injury that requires protection.

The point here is that a neo-liberal rhetoric of individual pain, instead of becoming a bolster against the forces of social inequality, indifference, and ignorance, counteractively undermines any possibility of affirmative social activism; it demolishes desire, diminishes difference, denigrates despair. Acolytes of the aggrieved politics of hurt are developing a notion of trauma that in classical Freudian circles is anything but. They are instead, in Halberstam’s argument, inculcating a hair-trigger sensitivity to injurious terminologies in such a manner that they are “censoring” the very discourses that led queer theorists to produce radical rhetorical challenges to the status quo and allowed them to reengage discourses of hatred, bigotry and condemnation by queering such languages from the inside. That is,

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queer theory has always had the powerful periperformative function of outing language. Without that sharpness, what has it become if not simply a censoring body? What, we might then ask, does that say for trauma theory? Specifically, what does it say for anyone who takes trauma seriously enough to risk exploring it beyond narratives of youthful anxiety, precarious subjectivities and a tired rhetoric of affect? I propose that we drop the concept of trauma here as something conceivable in the first place and interrogate what it is about trauma (around it) that keeps us coming back to it. What we ought to do is stop thinking about trauma as something we know about and start thinking about it as something we need to think about. What we require is an entirely new designation, or, at the very least, an awareness that the one we have is unmanageable, since the word “trauma” now registers as a catch-all term for all sorts of emotional discomfort regardless of psychological effect or impact. We need a new liquid rhetoric, a rhetoric of mobility, a linguistic catalyst charged with echoing unheard of hopes and desires, of speaking beyond the language of triggers, of hurt and simple cause and effect. Freud Again (and Again) The locus classicus in Freud’s writings on trauma is Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), wherein Freud becomes fascinated and perplexed by a pathological condition brought on by traumatic neuroses, such as those manifested in survivors of WWI. Today we associate such pathologies with what the DSM (only since 1980) refers to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. In Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, Freud describes as traumatic “any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield [Reizschutz]” and considers its manifestations in the repetition compulsion, a compulsion to relive the unpleasurable event over and over again, hence his revisions of dream theory as wish-fulfilment. The point, as Freud’s spatial metaphors explicate throughout this essay and again beautifully in the later Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), is that there is a protective shield [Reizschutz] against stimuli inherent in the psyche, a protective barrier or psychological skin, admittedly different for each individual, but there nonetheless, that allows for preparedness against fright and anxiety. Anxiety on its own, he will say, will not produce traumatic neuroses. In his own words, “I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis” [Ich glaube nicht, daß die Angst eine traumatische Neurose erzeugen kann]; something else is needed, such as the

unmediated shock of an unforeseeable event, like a train accident we walk away from and which becomes symptomatic only after the event has occurred.10 What is most striking about Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as in The Uncanny, a text which Freud was working on in tandem at the wake of the Great War in 1919, is that uncertainty is the pervasive, unsettling, overwhelming driving force in both. Trembling on the limits of intelligibility 6

both pieces repeatedly confirm Schelling’s hypothesis that traumatic events repeatedly reinstall themselves in consciousness because they are “something which ought to have remained hidden but [have] come to light”.11 Operating illogically, parasitically, paralogically, both pieces conflate the intelligible with the unintelligible, the conceivable with the unconceivable, the illuminating with the obscure, and the central with the peripheral. This is in part because of Freud’s inability to settle on a fundamental principle for the traumatic event. And that’s the point. For Freud, this “dark and dismal topic” [das dunkle und düstere Thema] of trauma becomes not a concept as such, but a non-concept, a kind of black hole sucking enlightenment in.

Everything that surrounds the ideas of deferral

[Nachträglichkeit], the repetition compulsion [fort-da], and tendencies towards unpleasure [Unlust], are consonant with the conclusion that trauma is never something readily available to us in the here and now; rather it is always something that escapes the realm of knowledge, something Nachtzeitlich, nighttimely, an afterthought that queers the concept of time itself. Cathy Caruth argues that “trauma, in general, describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”.12 It does not designate a state of anxiety by which one would be ready to denounce as traumatic the use of a designation that one has encountered time and again, despite the level of anxiety it may cause, or seem to cause. Since anxiety embodies a kind of preparedness which the shell-shock impact of traumatic events never allow. Hence, in my estimation, the need to underline why trauma is not something we can apply readily as a term. Or, at the very least, it is important to see that Freud himself, though conscious that anxiety does not equate with trauma, trauma, in and of itself, is not something that readily falls into its own category either. Instead, it becomes a shifter term, a perverse signifier, explaining that something, that awkward something, revealing itself in the uncanny repetitions of the event, repetitions that cannot be healed or ignored, quantified or dissolved. Trauma perverts itself, undoes itself, unlearns its role in its own theoretical apparatus. To be traumatised is not to know. It is precisely the inability to adjust to a knowledge that settles itself as the foundation of a lesson, at least if that lesson seeks to reside in a cognizant realm. The lessons of trauma are liquid, permeable, amorphic; they are the rivulets of memory, the lessons we learn that do not teach us anything but that which we need to learn again, in the ceaseless repetition of reliving, again and again. To read Freud in this way is to learn that his traumatic teachings reside in the lived experience of the world as it is becoming, of our worlds within those worlds, and of our worlds alongside others, our singularities pluralised, our hopes and wishes, dreams and neuroses multiplied in the unheard-of hope of a better future. Ignorance of trauma is not an ignoble condition; it is a step to realising the innate periperformativity of woundedness, its power to engage and disengage memory, structure, 7

thought, definition. It teaches us to unlearn ourselves in the fluidity of our lived experience, to read trauma against itself. It teaches us to be against trauma. It teaches us that we do not know what it is or in what direction it is going. Avenue Jean Zay Let me focus on a short aspect of the second film, “They Were Children,” in which Mme. Helene Mouchard-Zay speaks of the history of the CERCIL, its raison d’être, and her own personal history; the two of course are inextricably connected and are, as it were, immured in the story. This is to say that both stories are figuratively imprisoned; they connect and then cleave apart. For this reason I’m drawn to her testimony and memory which both is and is not a memory of her father – a man she never met and who was Minister for Education and Fine Arts from 1936-1939, as well as a leading figure in the French Resistance. So, in response to the film I want simply to pose some questions concerning what Geoffrey Hartman has elsewhere provocatively called “the testimonial challenge” and try to understand how, why, and under what circumstances, as Hartman also recalls, hyper-realistic media can create a specious present that does not counter-intuitively lesson our experience of the unrealistic but strangely heightens it.13 Here are some of my questions that follow from this and from seeing the film: how does watching testimony challenge intelligibility? What is it that remains unsaid, unheard-of in filmic testimony? What is it (peculiar to the specific genre of testimony) that challenges the listener to understand something, to comprehend it and assimilate it to the realm of knowledge that, say, narrative fiction, history, sociology does not? How does listening to accounts of the Shoah, watching it or reading about it, become an ineluctable moral obligation to understand rightly, correctly, justly, exactly? How does the appropriate response (remembering correctly, reading the right signs, thinking and feeling collectively about injustice) attain to such a moral, empirical obligation for both primary and secondary witnessing? What does it mean to respond responsibly in this way? How does one accede to the requisite protocols for following the right rhythms of the right reading? Finally, how can one read against its traumas? I speak of rhythm here and remember an extract from Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub’s reading of Claud Lanzmann’s landmark documentary, Shoah, released 40 years after the events it describes. Here’s Felman:

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What makes the power of the testimony in the film and what constitutes in general the impact of the film is not the words but the equivocal, puzzling relation between words and voice, the interaction, that is, between words, voice, rhythm, melody, images, writing and silence. Each testimony speaks to us beyond its words, beyond its melody, like the unique performance of a singing.14

Lanzmann, for Giorgio Agamben, was careful not to make the documentary an aesthetic experience in quite this way. It’s something that the documentary, rather, is careful to avoid. But it’s surely a problematic that pervades, especially when one begins to read a film between its lines and beyond its words, for its rhythms and voice – de Beauvoir, for instance, described Lanzmann’s film as “beautiful”. Who would describe a Holocaust documentary as “beautiful”? And yet, of course it can be. These stories are not all about subjection and degradation – some are about unbelievable acts of affirmation – the Weltmans’ escape for example. For sure, authors have no control over interpretation neither do witnesses nor historians, since the reading becomes a re-enactment of the initial disparity between the event of reading and the event of understanding. This is made clear by Mme Zay in a fascinating moment in the film. “About memory,” Mme Zay says, “I talked yesterday to Serge Klarsfeld, who has been talking in his books about it since the Liberation. And he told me that people do not read historians. That is to say history and memory are two different things”. Now, that is an odd statement and the film pauses after Mme Zay delivers the line, ostensibly to allow the audience to assimilate it. Then it zooms in to a signpost for “Avenue Jean Zay” (there are five in France according to Google map, so I assume both shots during and after the interview are Orleans). The latter move is also strange because when you begin to think about it, how often do people read the history or remember the reasoning behind the designation of street names? If people do not read history, as Mme Zay and Serge Klarsfeld claim, then the cut to the signpost is performatively indicative of the manner by which people blithely carry on in quotidian life without remembering or noticing historical significance. These signs trigger nothing. Cars and people pass by without stopping. Life goes on. The insignificant becomes significant only when it is read in the strong sense of that word, which is why I would argue that the obligation is one of impossible reading. That this present film opens and closes with street signs pays homage in some way to a recoverable past by drawing viewer’s attention to the presence of the past in the everyday. Street signs literally point us in the direction of the future. They also present us with possibilities gleaned from the past. One might say, however ironically, that they afford memory a direction just as testimony is designed to do; even 9

when we say, as so many commentators, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi among them, that testimony is impossible we find direction in it, a way of reading on, moving on to little signposts down the road. But of course there is more it to it than this. Mme Zay’s point is that there was a turn in the collective memory in France of the Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv and the Loiret camps after an article appeared in a French news magazine in the 90s entitled “An Investigation of the Forgotten Crime”, which explored the internment and deportation of children. After the article appeared people spoke of a “revelation”, as if they had “discovered” (not remembered) the history of the Holocaust. This is an extraordinary claim. The claim is that the public were not “ready” to hear this. They were not ready to read their history, to recollect, perhaps even in some cases to relive it. That had to be deferred. Mme. Zay’s appearance in Frozen Time, Liquid Memories is, as I see it, extraordinary. Marcel Weltman-Aron describes her as a “remarkable woman” and informs us that after being introduced to her by his sister he has spoken publically, in 2012, for the first time about his experiences in the Vel’ d’Hiv. Excluding her explication of the archives of the children in the cenotaph sequence, she appears for less than ten minutes in the film but her impact is powerfully provocative and challenging for the viewer. Behind her, as she speaks, is a children’s library and images of smiling officers and innocent victims of the Holocaust flicker in the background. Her presence here strangely draws the viewer’s attention to the function of memory and to what we see and understand beyond the words, through the rhythms of what is not being said, to echo Felman. Hers is a peculiar kind of testimony too because, as I’ve said, she doesn’t remember her father, only the “precious” words Mendes-France carries back to her from his internment with her father in Clairmonte-Ferrand – “she was a wonderful little girl”. Then her expression lightens. This is also the “injustice of memory,” as she describes it, a memory she was robbed of. It is, paradoxically, only by reliving the events that took her father from her that she is able to remember him. It is the second problematic, and the determining personal story she discusses – the same memory of her father she says is also that same memory of the Loiret concentration camps. Her memory is caught in the strange double bind of violence and love – frozen and liquid. It is all the more tragic, of course, for this. Personally, I want to keep all these questions concerning voicing and rhythm in focus and yet when I read and write about the Holocaust I feel a strange inertia, an invading paralysis that comes from being confronted with the inexplicable horror, the bigotry, the genocide; the inertia comes also from not knowing, quite simply, how to respond to this, how to respond to the testimonies of those who experienced the “rampant sectarianism” and “insane hatred” described by Mendes-France. Perhaps that is the most probable answer to the questions I harbour after seeing this film. I haven’t 10

known it, so I have difficulty reading it. But that is no excuse. In fact it may even place more responsibility on my shoulders to get it right, to read it right. Part of this responsibility is noticeable in the production name “Cinetaph” – a clever neologism announcing the task of seeing, reading and remembering simultaneously. To read it right is to be aware of what the film is teaching us. It is to be aware of what the film is triggering in us. Teaching Trauma or Trauma Teaching? Triggering raises a whole host of questions that might easily be glossed over, not least of all in pedagogical realms. What, for instance, does triggering say to people whose professional lives are entwined with narratives of trauma? How do teachers for example ensure that when they teach traumatic works or trauma theories they are not teaching in a manner that fosters a culture of woundedness that students succumb to unreflectively? How much exposure to trauma is ethically justifiable under the auspices of an educational experience? Also, at what point exactly do teachers know that their students are experiencing a traumatic event? How can they control the level of affect from a triggered experience? Josh Gordon and Will Speck’s movie Blades of Glory (2007) contains a parody that highlights the kind of woundedness indicative of scholars Halberstam’s polemic rails against. Blades of Glory is a riotous comedy about two male figure skaters (Will Ferrell and Jon Heder) who team up to become the world’s first same-sex professional pair-skating duo in a bid to become world champions. At one point in the movie Jimmy McElroy (Jon Heder) is on a date with Katie van Waldenberg (Jenna Fischer) when the two become embroiled in an intimate moment of sensitive disclosure. Katie admits her dislike for ice because of its association with her family, a sister and brother, both professional skaters, whom she loathes. Jimmy responds with an impassioned eulogy on the freedom he feels in his profession and concludes by asking Kate if she ever skated: Katie: “When I was a kid a little, but my brother and sister don’t like anyone to steal their focus”. Jimmy: “My life was nothing but focus. You know what I got for my tenth birthday? A six-pack of protein shakes and a subscription to Men’s Health”. Katie: “I didn’t have a tenth birthday. My sister told all my friends that I was in jail for armed robbery”. Jimmy “When I was nine my father insisted on having me circumcised to minimise wind resistance”. Katie “While driving me to skating practice my parents were in a fatal accident. My brother and sister blamed me for their death and they forced me to work for them, like a slave” [They kiss] 11

Katie: “Wow, I never really thought of that as a romantic story before”.15 The dialogue is at once hilarious and appalling. We’re drawn in by the hyperboles as they surmount one another in their atrocity; even the chronology must be surpassed by the contestants – when I was ten, when I was nine, when I was a child and so on. Both Katie’s and Jimmy’s lives have been Voltairean in their relentless series of tragedies and abuses. What is most instructive, however, is the kiss. One wonders why it is that this kiss occurs at the culmination of the contest. Katie’s exclamation that she never expected her stories to preface a loving encounter is doubly ironic because it’s exactly the reason she’s doing it. She uses her stories to garner sympathy and respect from Jimmy, who in turn develops his narrative of woes to the same ends. When they finally run out of steam they embrace, finding in one another a comparable crisis companion. Out of this traumatism then comes affection and love, a love based on a mutual aloneness and neglect. We laugh at the ludicrous embellishments because they remind us of people who invidiously play this game at the expense of those who are justifiably affected. There’s an element in its stupidity that strikes home. If we read into it enough we may begin to wonder how often this macabre game is played out in classrooms and lecture theatres across the globe and how truly unfortunate it is for those whose actual griefs are overshadowed by these scenarios. The paradox of sensitivity is that the insensitive so often become the new oracular orders of sensitivity. Therefore we must rail against trauma. In saying this I am not arguing for an education that hardens the intellect at the expense of emotional worlds of learning.

On the contrary, I believe, as did Adorno in “Education after

Auschwitz” that “being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such.” And I agree that “education must take seriously [the] idea in no wise unfamiliar to philosophy: that anxiety must not be repressed”. There is a place for anxiety in our world, a need for it. But there are differences between anxieties, crises and traumatisms, distinctions that should and must be kept open to reflection and challenges. These differences are often forgotten when we think we know how to envisage the traumatisms of others or even our own. The crisis comparison is important for us to think through pedagogical situations. In her landmark work on the subject, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and

History, Shoshanna Felman asks the following question in the opening sentence, “What is the relation between crisis and the very enterprise of education?”16 Her story develops around a class entitled “Literature and Testimony” that she taught at Yale in the fall of 1984. Her objectives were through readings of Camus, Mallarme, Freud, Dostoevsky, Paul Celan, and the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, to 1.) ensure that her class understood that testimony is pervasive and implicated in almost all types of writing and 2.) that testimony has a powerful performative dimension that does not 12

simply recount as much as defamiliarise and estrange us from what we think we know of testimony in the first place. As such, careful readers will note that Felman’s own recollections of crises in her class contain within themselves a corollary performative force. In recounting what happens in her class, Felman is wholly implicated in the testimonials she is examining and her positions on these are of paramount importance to us readers. What is particularly striking in Felman’s account of her class’s disintegration into disarray and confusion is her reconsideration of her role as a teacher. After her class has viewed testimonial videos of survivors in an apartment (not a classroom) they are moved to tears. What happens then, Felman calls an unforeseeable a crisis. She starts getting phone calls at odd hours of the night from her students wishing to talk about what happened. The students’ peers begin asking to join Felman’s classes and the ones that have attended her class begin forming groups outside of her classroom. There is a delayed affect from the class. Students begin feeling uneasy after twenty-four hours and beyond. They are “entirely at a loss, disoriented, and uprooted”. Felman then confers with Dori Laub, her coauthor, for counsel. “What was called for,” she concludes, “was for me to resume authority as the teacher of the class and bring the students back into significance”.17 On close inspection there are a great many difficulties with Felman’s approach to the situation, not least of all is the assumption that the crises are manageable, that the role of the teacher is tantamount to controlling the event of encountering the traumas of others. Felman’s desire to take control of the situation is difficult to admire, since she becomes a functionary of the desire to systematize the event of learning/unlearning. She becomes the medium of understanding, the focal point of knowing. What her narrative does open up, however, is a paradox at the heart of what Deborah Britzman refers to as “difficult knowledge” in her readings of Freud in her fine book After-Education. Freud, Britzman recalls, referred to education, more than once, as one of the “impossible professions”. His term “Nacherziehung” (after-education) encapsulates the difficulties with moving on, as the term

Nachträglichkeit also insists. After-education revolves around similar issues with traumatisms because it insists on movement and fluidity. It flows back to a concept of education as learning and forward to a conception of education as unlearning, reimagining, reliving, forgetting, moving on. However much our instincts lead us to take control we must resist the temptation to do so, since the event of learning is never understandable in that way. What is impossible, according to Freud and Britzman, is that however good our intentions may be we are never sure how our teachings influence our students or in what ways they become models for them. Mme Moucharcd-Zay’s testimony is also a kind of teaching. It teaches us that we need to hope for readers of history, for those readers to come who can resist the temptation to hide behind narratives of closure and forgetfulness. Just as Marcel Aron-Weltman 13

teaches us the facts, his facts, we must seek the said behind the unsaid, the quiet unheard-of hope beneath his mother’s hope. Films like Frozen Time, Liquid Memories are pedagogical through and through. They teach us how to respond to other people’s traumatic experiences; they teach us how to listen, deeply. The task of the translator, the listener, the viewer is to read beyond the fact and to be able to forget the fiction. I began this essay speaking about my personal experience reading/viewing Serge Klarsfeld’s

French Children of the Holocaust book. I remembered being unable to read it for more than twenty minutes. My feeling was that I was not reading in the way that I should; that I was not giving each image, each child, my attention. I was flicking through. After a while I was becoming immune. Klarsfeld’s book should have a trigger warning. It should read “readers are advised that they might accept this”. And this is the paradox: the need to understand is offset by the impossibility of doing so. With all responsible responses the response is impossible. You simply can’t read the facts with understanding. However much you try. Knowing this is not a way out. But it is a start. It’s the beginning of memory, a kind of liquid memory that refuses to solidify.

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Endnotes

1

Serge Klarsfeld, Susan Cohen, Glorianne Depondt & Howard M. Epstein eds. French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial (New York: New York University, 1996). 2 Ibid. 3 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 175. 4 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 57. 5 For a detailed account of this argument, see J. Hillis Miller’s The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) 6 Norman W. Spalding, “Resistance, Countermemory, Justice” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 41, Autumn 2014, p 136. 7 Ibid. 8 Halberstam’s article appears on the “the Bully Bloggers” website at https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/ (last accessed 10/2/15). In it he responds to new mandates issued by various third-level colleges in the US to issue ‘trigger warnings’ on classroom materials that may or may not cause offence or trigger traumatic memories in viewers. Halberstam’s retort went viral in a very short period of time and elicited strong reactions across the blogosphere. See also his second blog on this issue on the same website: “Triggering Me, Triggering You, or Breaking Up is Hard to Do”. 9 Monty Python’s Life of Brian dir. Terry Jones (1979) 10 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works trans. James Stratchey vol. 18, p.13 11 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works trans. James Stratchey vol. 17, p. 241 12 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), p. 11 13 See Hartman’s article “What the Dead Have to Say to Us” in Tablet Magazine, February, 2013. Online version: http://tabletmag.com/ (last accessed 10/2/15). See also Hartman’s The Longest Shadow: In the nd Aftermath of the Holocaust 2 Ed. (London: Palgrave, 2002) for one of the most subtle accounts of obligation and memory after the Shoah. 14 Quoted in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 36. 15 Blades of Glory dir. Josh Gordon & Will Speck (2007) 16 Soshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992) 17 Ibid., p. 48.

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