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Terror and the Arts
Previous Edited Volumes by Matti Hyvärinen
Hyvärinen, Matti, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykkänen, eds. 2006. The trav-
elling concept of narrative. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
(COLLeGIUM) http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume
_1/index.htm.
Carver, Terrell, and Matti Hyvärinen, eds. 1997. Interpreting the political:
New methodologies. London and New York: Routledge.
Terror and the Arts
Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of
Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib
NX650.T48T47 2008
700'.4552—dc22 2007047880
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The idea for this book grew out of a small symposium, “Arts and Terror,” held
at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in May 2006. The arrangement of the
symposium became possible thanks to the Academy of Finland, and its new
Centre for Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. The cen-
tre has three research teams; one of them is Politics and the Arts, the organizer
of the symposium. We thank all of the participants of the symposium for the
enduring discussions and enthusiasm that helped to launch the work for this
volume. Moreover, the existence of the international Politics and the Arts
group, now a standing group of the European Consortium for Political
Research (ECPR), helped greatly in getting in touch with the people inter-
ested in the hybrid area of terror and the arts.
As in every work of this nature, the editing process is one that owes many
thanks to those individuals who enable it. We are particularly grateful to the
research team coordinator Anitta Kananen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland),
not only for practical arrangements of the event, but also for all kinds of help
during the editorial process. Moreover, Professor Michael Shapiro (University
of Hawaii, United States) was of great help at a decisive moment in the pub-
lication process. Another key person is Peggy Heller (University of King’s
College, Halifax, Canada), who jumped in to help as a coeditor, commenta-
tor, and consultant whenever and wherever this was needed; Kati Thors at the
Copyshop in Espoo has freely given of her time and expertise in all things
technical; Annikki Harris (University of Helsinki Language Services) has
cooperated at the office, providing Lisa Muszynski with the requisite freedom
to work on this project almost continuously, while our families have borne
the brunt of the systematic neglect that such focus entails. Special thanks to
those nearest and dearest who have the patience to endure us to the end:
Tuula H. and Peter, Johann, and Annie M.
T
he idea of this volume is not merely to investigate the arts in order to
uncover new kinds of representations of terror, trauma, and violence.
The argument and purpose of this book is a step more ambitious. Art
Spiegelman has cleverly outlined this dilemma in his In the Shadow of No
Towers (2004) by saying, “Leave me alone, Damn it! I’m just trying to com-
fortably relive my September 11 trauma but you keep interrupting . . . Like
that mind-numbing 2002 ‘anniversary’ event, when you tried to wrap a flag
around my head and suffocate me!” Spiegelman works vigorously against the
political appropriation of the trauma of 9/11 by the Bush government, claim-
ing for himself a proper space for working through and unpacking the trauma
without hasty, projective, and dubious political mobilizations. While he is
trying to relive his trauma comfortably, as he says, he seems to reflect ironically
his need for distance from the political class.1 He is a participant in the polit-
ical process by virtue of working with terror and trauma, and not just by
depicting it. This is one of the paradoxes of the political literature on terror,
wherein the first moves seem often to consist in determined resistance to
politicization, and in a demand for an entirely personal experience of loss
before wider conclusions are drawn.
Spiegelman’s ironic work also explains and justifies the scope of this book
from one important perspective. The topic of this book is not terrorism per se,
enacted by a definite group of nongovernmental actors called “terrorists.”
The author’s autobiographical character Mouse, asleep and obviously dream-
ing about the innocent world of the erotic cartoon in his hand, is approached
by two ghastly figures, and according to the text, being “equally terrorized by
Al-Qaeda and his own Government.” This thread of “equal” terror by gov-
ernments is a recurrent theme in recent films (Alejandro Gonzáles In~árritu’s
2 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski
his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the
viaduct. . . . There was awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the
single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among
us all” (33).
The falling act may well be redescribed in terms suggested by Dominick
LaCapra (2001, 2004) as acting out, repeating the moment of terror. The act,
in its “awful openness,” seems to be the exact opposite of DeLillo’s carefully
mediated discourse; a highly disturbing and disturbed artistic way of
approaching terror and trauma. The jumps were as painful to the artist,
David Janiak, himself, and he died at age thirty-nine, “apparently of natural
causes” (220). Because of his acts, he had “been arrested at various times for
criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct” (220). We
have here an artist taking high risks, transgressing many boundaries, but at
the same time reproducing the original scene of trauma with minimal dis-
tance from it. Moreover, this is highly suggestive of the repetitive artworks of
certain Israeli artists exposed to suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,
recounted in this volume in Chapter 2 by Dana Arieli-Horowitz. David
Janiak, as indeed some of the real-life Israeli artists as well, may be accused of
not properly taking the reactions of the traumatized audience into account.
But is this power of provocation not something that the arts are working with
constantly? There is a trace of Dadaism in the act, in the sense that Kia
Lindroos writes about in Chapter 3, Janiak ostensibly having a clear “inten-
tion,” as Lindroos observes regarding Dada, “to create a scandal and inspire
public indignation.”
Yet the figure of the Falling Man is only one element among many other
aspects of repetition in DeLillo’s novel. A group of children withdraw repeat-
edly from the adults to a room with binoculars, in order to watch if and
when the next plane will hit the towers, insisting that the towers were not yet
entirely collapsed. Keith, the man who survived, delves more and more into
the repetitive and controlled world of professional poker after having lost a
friend he used to play poker with, and so on. Yet paradoxically, Keith, who
was estranged from his wife Lianne and almost entirely incapable of
expressing his inner concerns before the events of 9/11, now had occasional
moments of closeness with Lianne between his poker playing sprees.
Perhaps the most compelling singular element of the novel is its ending.
With regard to temporality, the novel resists conventional narrative progres-
sion—the insistence on various forms of repetition being one form of this
resistance—and instead creates a loop by ending just a moment before every-
thing began. At the end, Keith is back in Manhattan, at his office, right after
the attack and working his way down through the corridor, seeing his dead
4 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski
friend. This ending may be read in at least two different, yet interconnected
ways. Whatever life and vitality had returned to Keith’s life with Lianne and
his son, the traumatic moment of the collapsing towers and the smell of
death is there, and will always be there, whatever the cure. The experience is
not only in the past, but it persists in the present, and continues on into the
future. The temporary loop, in this sense, protects the novel from an overly
straightforward closure and moral elevation. Nonetheless, the ending may
also be seen, in all of its remaining horror, in a slightly more optimistic light.
After all, Keith is now revisiting the traumatic scenery; he is at least capable
of remembering, observing the details, seeing the man falling. The loop
remains, there is no fixed meaning or resolution of the consequences of the
event, yet the beginning is no longer an invisible, untouchable darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) does something analogous by foregrounding
the traumatic reactions and disturbed world of a nine-year-old boy who had
lost his father in the terrorist attack on Manhattan. The experimental narra-
tion of the boy’s partly psychotic world is connected thematically to Kuisma
Korhonen’s discussion on Georges Perec’s work in Chapter 6. The boy’s world
is even more sanitized of public, political maneuverings, and hectic national-
ism that followed the events than even Keith’s world in DeLillo’s novel,
thereby creating space for the artistic processing of the experience. Both of
these novels systematically reject the nationalistic frame of the events of 9/11,
thus “interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation,” as Olivia
Guaraldo observes in Chapter 11. In so doing, they, of course, simultane-
ously bracket all such sweepingly broad, totalizing theories and explanations
of the attack that Peggy Heller discusses critically in Chapter 4.
troops in Kashmir but the pogroms of the pandits was not prevented, why
was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as dis-
placed persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters
or relief or even register their names, why was that . . . The ministers of the
government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote
one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants
whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that” (296; 1 lakh=
100,000 in the Indian numbering system).
For the reader, this step from the grimly outlined story-world to authorial
indictment appears emotionally and surprisingly well grounded, while the
entire gravity of war crimes and terror had become so weighty that the open
charge feels almost like a relief: someone is out there to protest the cruelties,
including the reader as a secondary witness. A bit later—after an accounting
of the brutalities enacted by both parties, that is, the fundamentalists and the
Indian army—the narrator stops for a moment to reflect upon the situation
by observing, “There are things that must be looked at indirectly because
they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun”
(309). This is one of the enduring concerns about how far the arts can, or
any account for that matter, go in terms of describing—or performing, in
Janik’s case—horror without becoming part of that same horror, a theme
which is addressed further in this volume, especially in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.
Moreover, it can become an issue pivoting upon that of the dignity of the vic-
tim, as Frank Möller writes in Chapter 1, “If victims are humiliated and
abused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images,
then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of the
perpetrators.”
Rushdie’s well-trained, internationally experienced, callous and well-con-
nected terrorists seem to render some of their predecessors of no more than
two decades ago very amateurish indeed, as in Doris Lessing’s (1985) The
Good Terrorist and Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992). Lessing’s homespun, leftist
terrorists remain nearly comically shabby figures, in spite of the tragic conse-
quences of their operations. Perhaps we now tend to think that Lessing was a
bit too optimistic about the harmlessness of the terrorist drive, by not giving
us access to their more professional endeavors. In any case, the strictly realis-
tic mode of her novel is arguably more adequate for the narration of the
youth’s everyday activities than of the terror itself, which curiously becomes
virtually normalized by the conventional narrative form, becoming just one
occasion among many others. Random deaths do not signify anything in par-
ticular to the activists, at least nothing that a quote from Lenin and a compe-
tent rationalization could not wipe away. In consequence, what we obviously
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 7
witness is exactly the early days of killing idle emotions, in order to be able to
kill without any emotions. Alice, the female protagonist, muses upon the sit-
uation after the killings: “After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had cer-
tainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk,
the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terror-
ists” (452).
Interestingly, Lessing points out that her activists’ way of life was not, in
point of fact, oriented to achieve any recognizable political objectives.
Instead, it was the good feelings of the narcissist-as-activist, spending brilliant
days in picketing and shouting at the police, getting kicks out of resisting and
escaping the police, or even getting arrested, the excitement of transgressing
the borderlines between the permissible and the forbidden, the legal and the
illegal. The sheer fact of escaping the police renders activists, in their own
imagination, as dangerous and important. Learning the allegedly sublime
pleasures of transgression, even to the point of enjoying killing people was, of
course, essential for the education of Nazi officers as well as the globe-trotting
terrorists of Rushdie’s novel. Crime fiction has for a long time investigated
such serial crimes as rape and murder from the perspective of the particularly
addictive and subjectivity-creating excitement generated by the transgression
of these boundaries.
However, it is again a trap to see the world divided between the Western
“us” and the “terrorists” and their supporters. As a matter of fact, John Updike’s
Terrorist (2006) plays expertly with such expectations of the reader. In the
beginning, there is a sloppy Jew, an all-too-liberal white mother, seductive
and flirtatious American girls, and a widening Muslim front to support, edu-
cate, and manipulate the dedicated fighter. A great deal of the pleasures of
reading the novel comes from the sudden realization, by the end of the novel,
of an entirely different picture with nuances and a plurality of distinctions.
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is one of the bravest
attempts to see the whole issue from a not-so-self-evident North American
point of view. Hamid’s narrator, a young man coming from Pakistan to study
at Princeton (like Hamid himself ), succeeds in landing a job in a thriving
financial enterprise. It is in this line of work where economic “fundamentals”
need to be taken into account, and other—human, ecological, and what-
ever—lesser considerations to be ignored.
A politically oriented reader may still be slightly perplexed by parts of
Hamid’s novel. His narrator lives in New York City and is entirely dedicated
to his work in the financial sector. As 9/11 is about to occur, he is finalizing
his first big business assignment in the Philippines, and watches the events
unfold on television. He says, “I stared as one—and the other—of the twin
towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. . . .
But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack—
death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to char-
acters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes—no, I
was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly
brought America to her knees” (72, 73).This passage contains a few disquiet-
ing contradictions. The narrator had never before announced any reserva-
tions in his relationship with “America” (a term the Canadians, among many
other Americans, may find inconvenient in this context). On the other hand,
between the dashes he presents himself as a relatively naïve and apolitical
reader of the media. Yet he immediately knows how to react to the figures of
destruction exclusively on the symbolic level of the event. The reading of the
situation may differ from many hegemonic versions, but it certainly concurs
with the Bush administration in one regard: by seeing the event within a
clear-cut national frame. But within this chosen nationalistic frame, celebrat-
ing America on her knees, this reading again appears helplessly naïve, while
not seeing in the event itself the seeds for horrors to come as its natural con-
sequence. Later, when the “big” America attacks “small” Afghanistan, the pre-
viously light-hearted observer is full of moral rectitude. After allowing
himself a nationalistic reading of the event, the narrator becomes a purist
after returning to New York. He states, “Your country’s flag invaded New
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 9
York after the attacks; it was everywhere. Small flags stuck on toothpicks fea-
tured in the shrines; stickers of flags adorned windshields and windows; large
flags fluttered from buildings. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America—
not New York, which, in my opinion, means something quite different” (79).
Hamid’s narrator here has different political and ethical standards for New
Yorkers and himself. He can be exhilarated by the symbolic fall of “America,”
but New Yorkers should not see the event happening to or in America. In
fact, Siri Hustvedt (2006, 124) has offered quite a different reading of the
meaning of the flags as well. Brockmeier (2008), in his study of actual
responses to the trauma of 9/11, notes that patriotic and nationalist reactions,
so popular in the media and politics—and in the rest of the country—were
truly marginal among individual responses in New York City. Whereas
DeLillo, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Spiegelman, among many others, systemat-
ically resist nationalist readings of terror and terrorism, Hamid’s position
remains problematic despite his criticism of America.
Hamid’s work is one of those that foreground the media representation as
a real political event. Rather uncannily, Brett Easton Ellis (1998) obliterated
the borderlines between film and the novel’s “real-life” events in his paranoid
terrorist world of Glamorama to the ultimate extent possible. Film crews in
this novel are mysteriously already ever-present and shooting raw footage
when bombs are delivered and exploded in Prada or Gucci bags. Is the narra-
tor Victor Ward too strung out on a combination of drugs, always including
Xanax, a medication for panic attacks, to make a difference between fiction,
glamorous show life, and a vicious terrorist plan? Or do we witness a terrorist
network of top models along with their assemblage of the best brand name
products—and nearly always in front of photographers and film crews—with
its paranoid plans to create maximum havoc? Ellis’s terrorists combine the
glamorous public presence in front of cameras, high-quality technical exper-
tise in camouflage, and terrorist attacks with a renouncement of empathy for
victims and an obvious enjoyment of torture. All players have double or triple
agendas, leaving Victor Ward and the reader betrayed in their search for final
clarity and closure.
This cursory review on parts of the recent literature on terror is most of all
meant to emphasize the relevance of studying the arts in the context of terror.
There are many other novels to consider, such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday
(2005). In his The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee (1994) revisits
Dostoyevsky’s classical crime scene, discussed more thoroughly by Margaret
Heller in Chapter 4 of this volume, that naturally evokes the nineteenth-cen-
tury genre of literature focused on St. Petersburg—originally brought to life
by Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman of 1833.2 There
are entire genres such as crime stories and science fiction to be examined, not
10 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski
Visualizing Terror
Introducing the collection in Chapter 1, “The Implicated Spectator: From
Manet to Botero,” Frank Möller argues that, contrary to photographs of war,
famine, atrocities, and myriad forms of human suffering, the limits of pho-
tography are not the limits of art. Prefacing his argument, he begins with the
historical instance of the Edouard Manet painting, The Execution of Emperor
Maximilian (1867), “one of the finest examples ever of political art,” which
Möller characterizes as political, because it indeed complicated rather than
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 13
place and, in so doing, thus provides the theoretical anchor to the section as
a whole—bolstering and underlying the discussions of the preceding chapters
by Arieli-Horowitz and Möller.
Fictionalizing Terror
This second section offers a selection of articles on the subject of literature in
response to terror, which mirrors the previous section insofar as these chap-
ters are still coming to grips with the tension between violence and its artistic
representation. These four chapters begin with Margaret Heller’s reminder in
Chapter 4 that art and terror indeed have a long relationship in the literature
of the West, starting from perhaps the most famous example of such litera-
ture: Dostoyevsky’s—once again vogue—novel that highlights the activities
and internal dynamics of a terrorist cell in The Possessed (1872). Indeed,
Heller’s “Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West” confronts the
different types of terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia and concludes with
her own concern to reevaluate Dostoyevsky’s novel for the political ideas that
commentators, including Dostoyevsky himself, have thus far claimed for it—
thereby bringing into doubt that it now means what it used to for all con-
cerned, particularly in light of contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism. By
deconstructing the category of the “West” in this context, she problematizes
the means “through which modern evil can be externalized and essentialized.”
From Dostoyevsky’s engagement with terror, we shift forwards in time to
one of the most notorious cases of public violence and terror in recent Euro-
pean memory, that of Nazi Germany and the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, in
“To This Side of Good and Evil: Primo Levi as a Truth-teller,” Tuija Parvikko
launches an original thesis in Chapter 5 by putting aside the usual juridical
reading of Nazi genocide and embracing, instead, a political reading. Such a
viewpoint, as it turns out, allows her to get beyond the strictly black and
white juxtaposition of “innocent victim” versus the “evil perpetrators” (the well-
explored perspective), for the express purpose of understanding both the sur-
vivors and the participants in the debate over the Holocaust as “politicians.”4
For this purpose, Parvikko takes the (Barthesian) position of Hayden
White, who interprets the Holocaust as a “modernist event,” and contrasts
this with the interpretation of Giorgio Agamben, who argues the impossibil-
ity of integral testimony, by way of Primo Levi’s reports about Auschwitz.
This strategy thus positions her to suggest that Levi can be understood as
an Arendtian “truth-teller,” on the basis of which important issues are not
necessarily coming directly out of one’s own personal experience, but rather
on the basis of seeking the truth in the fight against silence, evasion, and
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 15
lying in a world where telling the truth—as she argues—has become “politi-
cal action.”
Parvikko’s thesis thus provides a relevant departure point for the next chap-
ter, in which Kuisma Korhonen examines Georges Perec’s autobiographical
novel W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1974). Standing at the heart of Korhonen’s
study in Chapter 6, “Narrating the Trauma: Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenier
d’enfance,” is Perec’s dovetailing text, which at first appears to be a story about
an island, in one typeface, with a supposedly autobiographical text, printed
in a separate typeface on the page, as the story weaves back and forth
between what looks like that of a narrator and his straightforward descrip-
tion of a distant and unusual place. What eventually becomes clear, however,
is that ‘W’ turns out to be a metaphor for Auschwitz and the dovetailing
texts themselves (supposedly between two distinct stories) merge as a Freudian
method for dealing with childhood trauma. If we recall, in this context, the
figure of the Arendtian truth-teller from Parvikko’s chapter, we might agree
with Korhonen that, although Perec makes clear that all his childhood mem-
ories are unreliable, it is nonetheless fair to conclude the manner in which
Perec’s text serves as a guide, or map, through the labyrinth of traumatic
memories. Korhonen thus assesses “fictional truth” in this context through
the parallels and resonances of experience that is brought to bear on author
and reader alike. In this sense, Korhonen’s insight echoes that of Parvikko’s,
because this “fictional truth” (between author and reader) can be interpreted
as another way of “seeking the truth in the fight against silence, evasion, and
lying in a world where telling the truth has become political action.”
Fitting right into this vein of observation is Chapter 7 by Matti
Hyvärinen, entitled “Too Much Terror? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and
the Circulation of Trauma.” Here, Hyvärinen analyzes J. M. Coetzee’s recent
novel Elizabeth Costello and the manner in which this Nobel prize-winning
novelist sets the reader up for a straightforward and predictable, one-to-one
correspondence of the text with his “own, personal” political viewpoint—
concerning the highly charged theme of good and evil, specifically regarding
the ethical fallout around the theme of the Holocaust. However, once the
reader is nicely in hand and situated with certain basic expectations, Coetzee
then systematically undermines these expectations in manifold and surprising
ways. Hyvärinen therefore concludes that the reader is left with Coetzee’s
open-ended trajectory of “possibility” and no firm, concrete one-to-one cor-
respondence or final interpretation, leading to the distinct impression that
Coetzee’s outlook might well reflect that of Perec in the preceding chapter by
Korhonen. It would thus appear that the political nature of all three of these
analyses is that of the Arendtian truth-teller, thereby perhaps substantiating
16 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski
Parvikko’s claim that telling the truth “may yet become one of the most
important modes of political action in the twenty-first century.”
If true, moreover, “telling the truth” as political action comes very close to
Andrei Bely’s symbolist solution in his novel Petersburg. Indeed, the alterna-
tive and (only) successful means for navigating around within Bely’s “city of
shadows,” suffering from (modernist) “illness and flu,” was to acquire “the
shadow passport” (Bely 1983, 206ff.; 1995, 404ff.); indeed, Berman picks up
Bely’s key insight and concludes:
The Petersburg influenza infuses the air of New York, of Milan, of Stockholm,
of Tokyo, of Tel Aviv, and it blows on and on. . . . The Petersburg tradition . . .
can provide them with shadow passports into the unreal reality of the modern
city. And it can inspire them with visions of symbolic action and interaction
that can help them to act as men and citizens there: modes of passionately
intense encounter and conflict and dialogue through which they can at once
assert themselves and confront each other . . . to become, as Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man claimed . . . to be, both personally and politically “more
alive” in the elusively shifting light and shadow of the city streets. (Berman
1983, 286)
Governmental Terror
The third section of this book addresses societies and situations justly charac-
terized as lying “in deep shadow,” in the Belian sense, where outright lies and
deception at the level of state policy, or community politics, created “unreal
cities” and environments that raises the concept of “terror” to new levels. It
opens with Chapter 8, “Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in
Romania and Chile (1974–89),” by the Romanian scholar, Caterina Preda,
who focuses on the neglected study of art and politics in the nondemocratic
cases of Latin America and Eastern Europe (Chile and Romania, respec-
tively). Preda asks two interrelated questions, “What is the relationship
between art and politics in a nondemocratic regime?” And, secondly, “How is
art used by nondemocratic regimes as a method/technique of ideologiza-
tion?” Her conclusions lead to the distinctions between art and politics in an
“authoritarian” society of the right (Chile) in contrast to that of a “totalitar-
ian” society of the left (Romania), respectively—where the ideological
“mood” (whether of the right or left) is nevertheless eviscerated by its univer-
sally violent “mode.”
This, in turn, provides timely insight for Minna Valjakka’s “Inciting
Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control: Chinese Propaganda
Posters during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).” Thus, in Chapter 9,
Valjakka shows that these art-cum-propaganda tools were the most favored
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 17
way of spreading the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party during the
Cultural Revolution, where Valjakka’s main aim is to inquire into how differ-
ent themes of art were used as instruments of mass manipulation in this total-
itarian society, and how the masses, in turn, reacted.
The fallout of inculcating ideology by way of mental-terror-as-govern-
ment-policy, moreover, is similar to the reaction of Israeli artists in Chapter
2, “working through” a collective trauma, where one Chinese artist reveals,
“What I have done is pull down this image from the pantheon to reality.
Working on Mao is one way to extricate myself from the nightmare; first I felt
sinful and fearful, now I feel nothing.” Such an observation goes a long way
in demonstrating the difference between random terror inflicted upon strangers
in the street, and systematic terror aimed at a populace that, in its aftermath,
can only feel “violated and used” by those purporting to lead and protect.
In Chapter 10, Javier Franzé’s “The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and
Weber: Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria”
picks up on this theme and explicitly investigates it outside the authoritar-
ian/totalitarian context. On the basis of the 1997 Atom Egoyan film, The
Sweet Hereafter, Franzé emphasizes the fact that in the hypothetical “real
world” of film, we are removed from the abstract and hypothetical context of
the written word—on a two-dimensional surface—to find ourselves in the
midst of the same ethical dilemmas, among living people, in a three-dimen-
sional world where simple, black-and-white arguments no longer suffice.
Franzé thereby shows that, with film, traditional issues and their arguments
can literally be cast in a new (cinematic) light that emphasizes both the util-
ity and value of exposing traditionally textbook issues to other formats, such
as the arts—and especially film—for their detailed exploration. It is here in
Franzé’s essay that this dynamic tension between ethics and aesthetics is once
again clearly juxtaposed, again mirroring Arieli-Horowitz’s observation of the
important role of art as a channel for “working through” grief and trauma.
invoking the work of the feminist theorists Judith Butler and Adriana
Cavarero, Guaraldo calls into question the “immunitarian function” of mod-
ern politics, where the tradition of natural law (Hobbes’s “protego ergo
obligo”), that is, obedience in exchange for protection, has been made obso-
lete. Guaraldo argues with Arendt, who “attempts . . . to abandon the politi-
cal fictive entity of man, the individual, the subject,” leaving the way open for
the “irreducible differences that qualify each human being . . . related to oth-
ers.” In this manner, the isolated, atomized figure of the “immune” individ-
ual is a fictitious entity and thereby provides the basis for a new anthropological
model resituated in the Bulterian “vulnerable self ” that is necessarily con-
fronted by and exposed to others. Such an entity would provide the basis of a
new political aesthetic wherein “truth-telling” might help see its way clear in
the new century to break out of the vicious circle of violence that lying in pol-
itics engenders—as Musil observed so acutely, “order,” however established
(from the right or from the left, as Preda demonstrates), somehow always calls
for “bloodshed.”
In this final chapter of the book, “Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on
Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art,” Lauri Siisiäinen turns a seldom-
addressed question inside out, by challenging the idea that the ear, sound,
hearing, and music fundamentally terrorize the modern political community.
In other words, such elements are considered a threat to the Occidental tra-
dition of political philosophy, which normally prides itself as being founded
on reason and subjective autonomy. Surprisingly, however, Siisiäinen strikes a
positive note in this context. Through the prism of Michel Foucault’s late
work on “care of the self ”—which would be the sensibility of the “vulnerable
self ” of the previous chapter—suggests that far from posing a threat to the
modern political community, such characteristics offered by “auditory” or
“sonorous” politics might help to provide the departure point for construc-
tive conflict, intervention, seizure, and change. Indeed, few commentators
have picked up on this in Foucault’s work. In the end, moreover, this
embraces contingency and the unknown in a way that plays upon Parvikko’s
emphasis on the middle voice, or intransitive writing.5
What this collection therefore pursues from the perspectives of visual
studies, literature, historiography, political thought, and philosophy, is to
excavate hitherto unseen dimensions of problems of the present, not merely
the “what” on the surface of time that demands a clear “meaning” that “makes
sense,” but rather to realize that time is also a “knot” wherein “the march of
chronicity is interrupted, and past, present and future start to dance in a cir-
cle—a dance in which each of the dancers is spurred on by one of the others
and bites the tail of the third” (Runia 2007a, 1). From such a perspective, it
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 19
is possible to see the way in which the era of terror is not overwhelmingly
inevitable and irresolvable. Rather, by deliberately invoking Berman’s sense of
the “possible”—of acquiring a “shadow passport” and stripping away our col-
lective and private illusions alike—we might see this present age as having an
innate potential for shearing away the veil of logic and “sense making” that
ultimately shields us from ourselves and a deeper “sense of reality.” Indeed,
Barthes serves as an example of this “shearing process” when he looks into the
picture of his dead mother and is caught unawares and pierced to the heart,
not by any objective “meaning” that could be derived from the photograph in
his hand, but by the sudden sense of “presence” it so strongly evokes as one of
the loopholes in the circularity of time.
professional division of work between the arts and scholarship. One way out
of this dilemma may be a reading strategy Dominick LaCapra (1995) has
suggested for historians, and what he calls “dialogical.” He writes, “Basic to it
is a power of provocation or an exchange that has the effect of testing assump-
tions, legitimating those that stand its critical test and preparing others for
change” (824).
LaCapra rejects in his dialogical approach the temptation of “the redemp-
tive reading” (of Clifford Geerz or Charles Taylor) to recover the whole
“meaning” of history or artwork. A challenge, dialogue, and even a provoca-
tive testing of it may allocate the artwork the “capacity to make us nervous,”
as Sontag puts it (1987, 8). Political reading should not, therefore, aim at the
closure of “interpretation” or “analysis” of the work, but rather aim toward a
dialogue wherein the work of art retains its power to challenge the preexist-
ing theories, be they political, philosophical, or literary. Because of this dia-
logical tension, there obviously cannot be one standard strategy for reading
politically. Nevertheless, there is one apparent consequence of this metaphor
of reading the arts politically. That is, in making the political dimension of
the arts relevant, the readers themselves participate in the artistic-cum-politi-
cal process, and they do so in such a manner that makes possible the “revolu-
tion” of viewpoints that LaCapra’s dialogical conception articulates.
References
Auster, Paul. 1987. In the country of last things. New York: Penguin.
———. 1992. Leviathan. London: Faber and Faber.
Bely, Andrei. 1916/1995. Petersburg. Trans. David McDuff. London: Penguin.
———. 1916/1983. Petersburg. Trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad.
London: Penguin. Original translation, with notes and introduction for Indiana
University Press, 1978.
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity.
London and New York: Verso.
Brockmeier, Jens. 2008. Language, experience, and the “traumatic gap”: How to talk
about 9/11? In Health, illness and culture: Broken narratives, ed. L.-C. Hydén and
J. Brockmeier. New York: Routledge.
Burke, Peter. 2005. History and social theory. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
DeLillo, Don. 2007. Falling man. New York: Scribner.
Ellis, Brett Easton. 2000. Glamorama. New York: Vintage Books.
Fludernik, Monika. 2005. Histories on narrative theory (II): From structuralism to
the present. In A companion to narrative theory, ed. J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz,
36–59. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2006. Extremely loud & incredibly close. London: Penguin.
The Arts Investigating Terror ● 21
Notes
1. We thank Pekka Tammi for this observation.
2. Published in 1837, Pushkin’s (1799–1837) poem fused the mythos of the city
St. Petersburg with that of its founder, Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), in the
image of a large, bronze equestrian statue by Etienne Maurice Falconet, com-
missioned by Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96). This statue was subsequently
unveiled at the center of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva River in Senate
Square in 1782. Dressed in a Roman toga and crowned with a laurel wreath,
Peter sits astride a rearing steed, the likes of which Pushkin finally immortalized
by placing at the center of his poem—a metonymy-cum-emblem that captured
22 ● Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski
all the latent ambiguity regarding the country’s destiny and the “fate of its cap-
ital,” fused together in Pushkin’s poetic imagination (Volkov 1997, xi; see also
Bely 1983, 323–24). And although Gogol and Dostoyevsky, to name just two
of the most well-known of the Russian cultural elite to follow Pushkin’s lead in
featuring St. Petersburg at the center of their works (as a metaphorical tension
between East and West), it is the Silver Age’s Symbolist poet of the 1910s,
Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev [1880–1934]), who authored one of
the twentieth century’s great modernist novels, Petersburg (1983, 1995, both
based on the 1916 Russian edition). For the purpose of the present introduc-
tion, moreover, the singular symbolic feature of this novel, framed during the
Russian revolutionary year of 1905, is that of two students posited at its “spher-
ical” center—would-be terrorists on different trajectories, echoing the different
“modernizing” trajectories of Russia herself (Bely 1983, 324). As the translators
point out, “the structure of the novel as a whole is circular . . . In short, we find
ourselves moving further and further back in time and space, only to experience
other beginnings and other returns. The ending of the novel seems ambigu-
ous . . . but there can be no real endings for Bely. The world of his novel is a liv-
ing organism, which constantly renews itself and which makes mockery of
man’s efforts to cut it to his own limited horizons” (Bely 1983, xxi).
3. Moreover, the overwhelming controversy that the Abu Ghraib photos mani-
fested has given rise to new publications that review and disseminate knowledge
of similar reprehensible behavior exhibited by American (and British) soldiers
also in the past, including Giles MacDonogh’s recently published After the
Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, reviewed by historian Patricia
Meehan (2007). If the images from the Abu Ghraib prison had not been so
widely available and provoked such an outcry (opening up an otherwise well-
hidden topic), MacDonogh’s book might not have found its public so easily—
or found it so receptive to such a disturbing message.
4. Peter Burke (2005, 21–43) would perhaps point out here that this former, more
usual juridical viewpoint is but one way of establishing elements in a model for
one particular examination of the Holocaust. In such a light, another perspec-
tive, that of the political, is still ripe for a new construal of familiar evidence in
manifesting new observations and, perhaps, in coming to previously unantici-
pated conclusions.
5. Bradford Vivian (2004) makes the case for the middle voice from the point of
view of rhetoric (as opposed, for example, to that of literary theory), which is,
furthermore, developed on the basis of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1997). Vivian’s text clarifies the common thread of Foucault’s oeuvre as being
“the status of the subject, not as an essential identity, but as a dispersion of dif-
ference” (Vivian 2004, 197n6) and, in a systematic presentation, illuminates
the value of the middle voice as a tool with which to break open discourse in any
domain, as is in abundant evidence in a majority of the preceding chapters of
this collection.
PART 1
Visualizing Terror
CHAPTER 1
Frank Möller
P
hotographs of war, famines, atrocities, and other forms of human suf-
fering may aestheticize suffering and anaesthetize emotions. Quite
regardless of the photographer’s intention, they often fail to trigger a
political response to that which they depict. Indeed, photographs are often
accused of having a dulling and desensitizing effect, reflecting processes of
habituation and self-protection on the part of the viewers who might read
them as evidence of their own political and moral failure to prevent this
very suffering. However, “the limits of photography are not the limits of
art” (Danto 2006) and photography is not as limited as it is often accused
of being.1
The role of the figure with the rifle at the painting’s front right side is
obscure. His attire, resembling that of a peasant more than that of a soldier,
is different from that of the rest of the firing squad. He is further detached
from the firing squad by seemingly looking in the wrong direction, namely,
in the direction of the beholder, thus both disconnecting himself from the
execution scene and uncomfortably involving the viewer in it, although his
eyes, hidden behind the hat-brim, cannot be seen. Next to him is a man with
a sword, presumably the sword officer, but his role in the execution is unclear,
too. Positioned behind the execution squad, he cannot possibly have given
the command for the execution that, as the smoke of the rifles indicates, is in
motion, having already affected the figure depicted on the painting’s left side,
bent forward (although it is impossible to know whether he is wounded or
dead). Thus, there is actually not much that the painting reveals clearly and
unmistakably. It would also be naïve to assume that it would actually be pos-
sible to grasp that what it does reveal by simply describing it: every descrip-
tion is the construction of something new because verbal and visual narratives
give very different accounts of the world (MacDougall 1998). Therefore, as
John Elderfield (2006, 69) puts it in the catalog of the 2006 Manet exhibi-
tion at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,3 for which he served as cura-
tor, “we should notice the impossibility of firm identification that this
painting asserts,” among other things, because the figures that in later paint-
ings can clearly be identified as Maximilian, Mejía, and Miramón are, in the
Boston painting, “nameless as well as faceless.” Furthermore, the painting’s
“blurred, irregular patches of spread, thinned, compacted, scratched, and
abraded paint are not simply representations of the smoke of the rifles or the
fall of morning light upon the execution; neither are they marks of tentative-
ness and indecision. Rather, they should be thought of as positive statements
of uncertainty . . . of someone torn between painting uncertainty and advanc-
ing a project of knowledge” (69).
Thus, without wanting to suggest that paintings and photographs operate
in similar manner, it can be said that every interpretation of this painting has
to be aware of what Walter Benjamin has formulated with respect to photog-
raphy, namely, that without captions, photographs are bound to get stuck in
the approximate (1963, 64). It also has to be aware of what Marianne Hirsch
has noted, again with respect to photography, that there is a tension “between
the little a photograph reveals and all that it promises to reveal but cannot”
(1997, 119). However, both the tension referred to by Hirsch and the
approximate referred to by Benjamin might be an asset rather than a liability.
Rather than diminishing the painting or the photograph to the depiction
and, perhaps, critique of a given, singular event, it might help acknowledge
The Implicated Spectator ● 29
firing squad can clearly be discerned. Simply by being there, however, they—
like us—become accessories to the execution, accomplices perhaps, not least
because, although “having knowledge of suffering points to an obligation to
give assistance” (Boltanski 1999, 20), we cannot do anything to prevent it. In
addition to the group of people watching the execution scene, there are also
two clusters of anonymous people on the hillside that cannot be dissected
into the individuals of which the groups, far away from the execution scene,
consist. These groups seem to have been Manet’s response to reports in the
newspapers of groups of poor Indians gathering on the hillside. They “are not
only too distant to see properly; they are also too distant to be heard or to
hear” (Elderfield 2006, 138). Their miniaturization corresponds with the
overall lack of importance attached to indigenous people in colonial dis-
course and practice and the colonists’ proclivity to speak and act on their
behalf and, ostensibly, in their interest. It might be interpreted as Manet’s cri-
tique of this colonial practice, but their depiction as anonymous groups of
people corresponds with the colonial practice, still observable today, of reduc-
ing individual people to “figures in the crowd” (Gregory 2004, 199).
The experience of one’s own moral failure in the sense that one has not
been able to prevent an execution or, for that matter, another form of vio-
lence is an almost daily experience for people exposed to media coverage of
wars, famines, atrocities, and other forms of human suffering. Photography is
often blamed for having a “dulling, if not desensitizing” effect (Danto 2006).
Susan Sontag has even suggested that “most depictions of tormented, muti-
lated bodies do arouse a prurient interest” (2003, 95). However, these generic
assessments seem to be inattentive to both the surplus of meaning that pho-
tographs always carry with them and the differences among viewers in
responding to them. Indeed, many photographs, shown and seen hundreds
of times and engraved on each person’s pictorial memory, still move us, touch
us, make us cry. Thus, Arthur Danto’s generic critique seems to be unfair:
while some photographs do have a dulling effect, others do not.6 Some pho-
tographs have a desensitizing effect on some viewers but not on others. Some
photographs have a dulling effect because they are shown too often; it is the
repetitive display of a given photograph, not the photograph as such that is to
be blamed for desensitivization (Möller, 2006). In addition, and often
ignored in analyses of photography, photographs not only have a visual
dimension but also a material dimension. They not only touch us, but we can
touch them with the sensitive tips of our fingers and by so doing relate to
them and to that which they depict; a corporeal relationship that can hardly
be established with respect to paintings exhibited in museums and digital
photography and the display of its products on the computer screen.
32 ● Frank Möller
This is arguably one of the reasons for the peculiar reaction to the publi-
cation of the now notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, which were
visual documents of mistreatment and torture of inmates at the U.S. military
prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, twenty miles west of Baghdad. Most viewers first
saw these photographs on the screens of their computers or television sets.
These photographs were taken by the jailors between October and December
2003, emailed to friends, and digitally disseminated almost in real time all
over the television, computer, and newspaper legible world. The images were
decipherable also by illiterates to whom the written accounts of the scandal
may have been incomprehensible. When published in 2004, the photographs
were seen in parts of the non-Western world as another piece of evidence of
the West’s moral hypocrisy, degeneracy, and inattentiveness to the values of
others. They appalled Western observers, although some were shocked not by
that what the photographs depicted, but rather by the fact that the pho-
tographs, in violation of U.S. law, had been taken and published.7 Since “an
existing body of facts is usually compatible with a number of separate stories”
(Ringmar 2006, 407), it is not surprising that two master narratives have sub-
sequently been constructed with reference to the images. The official U.S.
position, on the one hand, focused on “operators’ errors” and “a few bad
apples.” On the other hand, the position held by, for example, Sheik
Mohammed Bashir saw the images as “perfect symbols of the subjugation and
degradation that the American occupiers have inflicted on Iraq and the rest of
the Arab world” (Danner 2004, 28). As always, the images show both and,
owing to the surplus of meaning that every image carries with it, more.
The Western discourse revolving around the Abu Ghraib photographs was
mainly focused on the roots of the scandal that, according to Seymour Hersh
(2004b), lie in the expansion of a secret operation in the context of the fight
against al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. The
Western debate also stressed the role of the perpetrators, their superiors, and
commanders—the chain of command (see Hersh 2004a)—and investigated
the question of individual and collective guilt. It elaborated on the question
of whether the treatment of inmates in Abu Ghraib was torture or not
(Martin 2006, 516–17) and it discussed the question of whether the Geneva
Convention was to have been applied to Abu Ghraib or not. The Western
discourse, too, focused on the question of the extent to which these prac-
tices were, or seemed to be, covered by law and on the question of whether
or not these practices were “systemic. Authorized. Condoned. Covered up”
(Sontag 2004).
Some authors speculated “that the perpetrators of the abuse had no spe-
cific end in mind” except teaching the victims “who [they] are and what
The Implicated Spectator ● 33
Cotter, writing on the Manet exhibition in the New York Times on November
3, 2006, writes, “What happens when a powerful country with imperial
ambitions forces its way at gunpoint into the affairs of another, distant coun-
try, of which it has no cultural knowledge, on the pretext of bringing enlight-
ened governance? And that country meets the encroachment with violent
resistance? You get disaster.”
It is also—and despite all differences—quite obvious to compare the
paintings of the execution of emperor Maximilian with the December 30,
2006, execution of Saddam Hussein, video-phoned footage of which could
be seen on television and on the Internet. With respect to Fernando Botero:
Abu Ghraib, the parallels are even more obvious. The paintings have clearly
been inspired by what happened in Abu Ghraib. These events helped turn an
artist into an eminent political voice, who was hitherto best known not for
his political statements but “for his highly mannered, widely popular paint-
ings and sculptures of corpulent figures: nudes, personages from famous
paintings of the past, and men and women from all walks of Latin American
society” (Heartney 2007, 128).13 Botero, having resided in the United States
from 1960 to 1973 and being familiar with and appreciative of that country’s
culture, politics, and society, is also quoted as saying that the Abu Ghraib
works represent for him “both a broad statement about cruelty and at the
same time an accusation of U.S. policies” (Ebony 2006, 12). By rejecting to
sell his paintings, Botero both refuses to make money out of the victims and
implicitly criticizes the American way of life and its tendency to turn almost
everything into a commodity.
There are also parallels between Botero’s work and Manet’s in the sense
that both Manet and Botero imagined, as Elderfield puts it with respect to
Manet, “an unseen event, known only through written text” (2006, 51).
Indeed, according to Juan Forero, writing in the New York Times on May 8,
2005, Botero’s paintings are mostly based on news reports and other pub-
lished descriptions, for example Hersh’s reports in the New Yorker, and not
primarily on the photographs—although Botero, as an “admitted news
addict,” is also said to have done further research on the television and the
Internet (Ebony 2006, 13). His reliance on written accounts seems to be one
of the reasons for one of their most striking features, namely and in contrast
to the photographs, the absence of the perpetrators from most of the paint-
ings and the strong focus on the victims—a feature that the paintings share,
curiously enough, with the documentary practice of British colonial rule in
late nineteenth century India, taking photographs of prisoners in a way very
similar to the Abu Ghraib photographs but excluding the jailors from repre-
sentation (Ghosh 2005). As to Botero’s paintings, Eleanor Heartney writes,
36 ● Frank Möller
“With a few exceptions, the prison guards are offstage or represented only by
a boot or a hand emerging from beyond the canvas edge. Instead, the focus is
on the prisoners themselves, as they suffer their torments with grimaces that
are often largely obscured by hoods or blindfolds. In the absence of fully vis-
ible faces, these naked and near naked bodies become the vehicles of emo-
tional expression” (2007, 130).
Just as Manet was rather liberal in incorporating only selected aspects of
the available information on Maximilian’s execution into his paintings,
Botero counter-factually adheres to his trademark—figures “exaggerated
principally in terms of their volumetric relationships to their surround-
ings”—so as to assign to the prison inmates “a psychological and moral
weightiness that commands, if it does not overwhelm, their confined spaces”
(Ebony 2006, 10). Although Hersh, in the New Yorker, wrote about “grin-
ning” and “smiling” soldiers, giving “thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps
seven naked Iraqis” (2004a), the jailors in Botero’s paintings are neither smil-
ing nor grinning. Rather, in the few paintings where their faces can fully be
seen (Abu Ghraib 13, Abu Ghraib 17, Abu Ghraib 19, Abu Ghraib 43, and
Abu Ghraib 77), they are embodiments of grim and brutal determination. In
other paintings, their faces are off the canvas (Abu Ghraib 4, Abu Ghraib 10,
and Abu Ghraib 16), their heads are painted from behind (Abu Ghraib 9) or
hidden behind arms raised in order to beat a prisoner (Abu Ghraib 2). In con-
trast to Botero’s paintings on the war in Colombia bearing such titles as
Massacre in the Cathedral and Massacre in Colombia, his Abu Ghraib paint-
ings are simply numbered from Abu Ghraib 1 to Abu Ghraib 86. Thus,
although his representational strategy of showing, in some of his paintings,
only a boot or a hand of the perpetrators reminds the viewer of Goya’s Plate
15 from Los Desastres de la Guerra (Y no hai remedio [And there’s nothing to
be done]), implying the presence of soldiers only by the top of their bayo-
neted rifles, Botero deviates from Goya by not adding textual explanations to
what is to be seen in the paintings. Thus, Goya, on the one hand, seems to
have believed that in order to lend authenticity to the etchings’ “ghoulish cru-
elties” (Sontag 2003, 44), verbal explanations were needed, “offering assur-
ances of the image’s veracity” (46).14 Botero, on the other hand, relies on the
power of the painting. In fact, no one—not even the fiercest apologists of the
U.S. occupation of Iraq—seems to have called into question the authenticity
of both the Abu Ghraib photographs and Botero’s paintings.
What Botero’s works make us realize, then, is that “we knew that Abu
Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours.”
The paintings, thus, “establish a visceral sense of identification with the vic-
tims” (Danto 2006)—a sense of identification that neither the photographs
The Implicated Spectator ● 37
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Vogl, Joseph. 2004. Folter im Bild. Die Zeit, http://www.zeit.de (accessed May 13,
2004).
Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The era of the witness. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Notes
1. Many thanks to Eeva Puumala for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of
this essay.
2. In addition, Manet produced a lithograph of the scene, currently owned by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a small oil painting that can be
seen at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
3. Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, Museum of Modern Art, New York,
November 5, 2006–January 29, 2007.
4. The same can be said with respect to Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra and
Jacques Callot’s Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre.
5. Likewise, Goya’s cycle Los Desastres de la Guerra was published only posthu-
mously and Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian was for the first time
publicly shown in Europe in 1905 (the Boston and the Mannheim paintings;
the fragments of the London painting were reassembled by Edgar Degas in the
1890s but recombined on one canvas by the National Gallery, London, not
before 1992). The Mannheim painting was privately shown in London in 1898,
however. The lithograph, when presented for official registration, was prohib-
ited (Elderfield 2006, 17–18, 116–17).
6. Thus, Sontag (2003, 105) now asks, “As much as [photographs] create sympa-
thy, I wrote [in On Photography (1977)] photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this
true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence
that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship
neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?” The same question can
be asked with respect to her claim, cited earlier, that depictions of tormented
bodies arouse a prurient interest.
7. “As a result of the Abu Ghraib debacle, most U.S. soldiers in Iraq are prohibited
from taking photographs and videos while on duty” (Ebony 2006, 8).
8. The “Article 15–6 Investigation of the 8ooth Military Police Brigade (the
Taguba Report)” is reprinted in Danner (2004, 279–328).
9. For sworn statements by Abu Ghraib detainees, see Danner (2004, 225–48).
40 ● Frank Möller
10. The English equivalent to the German word entmündigen is “to legally incapac-
itate.” The German word is derived from the word Mund (mouth), so that ent-
mündigen also refers to situations in which someone is not permitted to speak
or act for him or herself. Rather, others are speaking and acting in his or her
stead. This obviously has always been an important ingredient of the colonial
discourse and practice, turning subjects into objects, and it, too, “is, funda-
mentally, a political question about who gets heard” (Couldry 2000, 57). Thus
the claim, made in cultural and postcolonial studies, that voice be given to mar-
ginalized and silenced people(s) is insufficient as long as others, in particular
“we,” are not willing to listen.
11. For example, commenting on the photographic exhibition Here: Remembering
9/11, the first exhibition to go on show at the World Trade Center Memorial in
New York City, Alice Greenwald, the memorial’s director, is quoted as saying,
“There’s literally nothing to see but a gaping hole in the ground . . . And yet
people come, as if they’re on pilgrimage. It’s as if they’re looking through these
images to the site. It’s deeply emotional” (Arendt 2006).
12. Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, Marlborough Gallery, New York, October 18,
2006–November 21, 2006 (see also Botero 2006).
13. Prior to the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings, Botero had already attracted
attention as a political artist when, in the late 1990s, he started to create works
depicting the drug-related war in Colombia in shocking detail. Furthermore his
portraits of figures of authority are said to have “routinely satirized” these fig-
ures’ “trumped-up grandeur” and “air of self-importance” (Ebony 2006, 11).
14. See, for example, I Saw This (Yo Lo Vi) and And This, Too (Y Esty Tambien).
15. See http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/mumford/mumford10–5–17
.asp (accessed February 19, 2007).
CHAPTER 2
Dana Arieli-Horowitz
Introduction
A
rt produced in relation or as a reaction to terror is the focal point of
the present discussion. This chapter centers on art in the age of ter-
ror. Moreover, I will focus on art created during the years 2000 to
2004, throughout the Al Aqsa Intifada or the Second Intifada to which both
the Jewish and Palestinian societies were exposed.1 It appears that the Israeli
artistic community unconsciously and unintentionally produced a flood of
creative work with terror at its core. Most of the artists I interviewed2 reacted
to acts of terror by depicting both Israeli and Palestinian life under the
shadow of terrorism.
Reactions of the artist community to terror are fragmented, heteroge-
neous, and intense. This chapter wishes to offer a preliminary typology that
may facilitate different readings of Israeli art dealing with terror. As we shall
see, it is possible to differentiate between various types of reactions, but on
the whole, artistic reactions may fit a spectrum that has direct media art on
one end and abstract political art on the other. The following pages discuss
both types in depth.
There are many precedents of art reacting to terror,3 and I certainly do not
claim that politics and terror force their way into art in Israel alone.
Nevertheless, the uniqueness of the Israeli case is derived from its intensity, its
all-encompassing extent, and the variety of styles that artists resort to when
dealing with terror. I believe that this intensity of creation fits the term cul-
tural trauma.4 It appears that not all national traumas produce cultural ones,
42 ● Dana Arieli-Horowitz
and that only in rare cases does the intensity of reaction in the artistic sphere
justify the term. Following Jeffrey C. Alexander, I use the term cultural
trauma, which seems appropriate only when the vast majority of artists
within a community react to a specific event.
so that, although the viewer may recognize a concrete political context, there
is always another layer of meaning.
Abstract political art reacting to terror may be classified into various types
according to the themes and iconography chosen by the artist. Some artists
deal with suicide bombing sites; others try to depict “the other.” In so doing,
these artists may be criticizing the political reality that has driven the terror-
ists to an act of suicide. In other cases, artists attempt to digest the traumatic
events of our times through the very process of creation. The constant return
to sites of terror in Israeli art might hint at a posttraumatic reaction. In the
following pages, I will present some examples of each of the categories I have
mentioned, unfortunately only a fraction of what actually exists. As will be
shown, in some cases, artistic creations may suit more than one category or
type of reaction. To my understanding, the greater the variety of layers of
interpretation the better the work is. Depending on the “strategy” chosen by
the artist, the result becomes a very sophisticated and unique form of creation
used to depict terror. The uniqueness is derived from a balanced look at a
complex political reality, one that reflects a world view that is sometimes
escapist, ironic, or both.
Carmit Gil’s bus presents another layer of abstract political art. Gil (b.
1976) participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale, where her work was exhib-
ited in the central pavilion. In 2002, when she completed her bus, no one in
Israel could have seriously taken it for a vehicle of public transportation.
Nevertheless, her interpretation differs sharply from that of Raz. The red and
fragmented remains of the bus are not taken out of any context, and may be
located anywhere. The viewer has no immediate clue as to where, if at all, this
disaster took place. The Israeli viewer, used to seeing remains along the road,
associates it with the vehicle skeletons of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War lying
along the road that leads to Jerusalem, but to other viewers no hint is given.
The artist almost urges the viewer to climb up the stairs and look at what
remains of the bus. These remains, like human remains, are cleaned up imme-
diately after “the event,” urging people to get back to daily routine. Gil may
be referring here to the activities of the Zaka8 organization, which has
appointed itself to the work of cleansing the “scene” and obsessively collect-
ing all human remains for burial.
Beyond reading Gil’s bus as a reaction to terror within an immediate con-
text, it is possible to look at it as a creation dealing with open space. When
asked about her intentions, the artist referred to Georges Perec’s writings and
particularly to his Espèces d’espaces (see Perec 1974). It is exactly the ability to
read this work on so many levels that reflects my argument regarding abstract
political art.
which photographs shape our collective memory. Reeb and Kratsman’s col-
laboration is based on an affinity of world views. It is, for example, apparent
in Kratsman’s “Om el Phaem,” “translated” by Reeb as “Where are the
Soldiers?” (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).9
Kratsman’s image depicts everyday reality in the occupied territories where
men are stripped of their clothing so that they can be searched for explosives.
Reflections of Posttrauma
Not only does the intensity of the art justify the term cultural trauma, it
appears that the methods, techniques, and materials sometimes chosen by the
artists hint at a posttraumatic reaction and even at a posttrauma therapeutic
treatment. Some artists feel a need to go back to all the places where acts of
terror have occurred; others try to digest horrifying images taken at the scene
either by looking at them again and again or by trying to overlook the horror
and paint them in “other” colors.
A fascinating example of a process of creation that seems to have had ther-
apeutic value comes from the studio of Gal Weinstein (b. 1970). Weinstein
took the images of Saddam Hussein’s sons Qusay and Uday. When I asked
Weinstein how he acquired the images, he replied that they were the images
of Saddam Hussein’s two dead sons, probably released by the American media
as part of its war propaganda. The materials he chose to work with hint, per-
haps unconsciously, at creation as therapy (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4).
Figure 2.3 Gal Weinstein, Uday, 2004.
they would gain seventy-two pure virgins in heaven. Female suicide bombers
are enticed by the promise of a wedding to be celebrated in heaven with their
betrothed—the male suicide bombers. Thus Sodaey stresses the irony in
the title of another work of art—Female Suicide Bombers for Male Suicide
Bombers. This time, she uses images from the media that she works into a
beautiful, if chilling, alienation. Her use of acrylic on canvas aims at imitat-
ing Gobelin needlework. Even though the image is one of a body hacked to
pieces, the needlework processing makes it seem detached and far away. In
many cases, Israeli art dealing with terror hints at posttrauma.
In “Aftermath,” Yoav Horesh (b. 1975) revisited, over a period of several
years, all the sites where suicide bombings had occurred. Going back to places
where everything happened appears to me to be another type of posttrauma
reflected through art. The images hardly provide any testimony to the horror
that happened there. Horesh uses clean black-and-white images that have
nothing to do with the overwhelming, messy, and red reality characteristic of
such scenes. I believe that the power these images exude comes directly from
the artist’s choice of black and white, which rather hints at the horror of ter-
ror while at the same time contradicting the overextensive use of color images
in Israeli media during the age of terror.
The choice of black and white instead of “true” colors may also be con-
nected with the obsessive tendency of Israelis to clean up the terror site and
resume normalcy immediately. This need to immediately cleanse the scene is
part of a larger phenomenon that has assumed tyrannical dimensions in
Israel—the need to completely wipe out tragedy.12 This frenetic drive to con-
ceal pain and suffering certainly does not help in recovering from trauma.
This tendency to wipe out reality reminds me of the way Jewish Holocaust
survivors were received in Israel; they too were obliged to sweep away their
past and forget everything they had left behind. As the next paragraph will
show, interrelations between terror and the Holocaust are prevalent in
Israeli art.
Nazis is clear to anyone looking at these images. The fact that an Israeli artist
has chosen such images as a point of reference is both perplexing and fasci-
nating. Does he identify with the criticism, believing, as a left-winger, that
Israeli society deserves to be depicted in this manner, or does he sustain the
opposite opinion in its extreme, namely that producing and publishing such
images means sharing the Nazis’ anti-Semitic world-views? Whatever the
answer, we are looking at a sophisticated work of art that includes various lay-
ers of interpretation.
In “Man/Dog Teams,” Weinstein places straight steel wool on a wall. Wolf
dogs are being led by figures that resemble policemen or soldiers. The dogs
may be searching for explosives in what seems to be an ordinary setting
known to every Israeli. Yet there is another layer that leads beyond the imme-
diate. Choosing this imagery may trigger an association that is deeply rooted
in Israeli collective memory. The Nazis used wolf dogs to cause fear on vari-
ous occasions. Using a repertoire of images based on the Holocaust as part of
the vocabulary of contemporary everyday life in early twenty-first century
Israel can hardly pass as accidental. I believe it calls attention to the continu-
ous stress experienced by citizens whose sense of security and concepts of
home versus the front are completely shattered. This might very well be an
encounter between successive cultural traumas.
52 ● Dana Arieli-Horowitz
suicide bombing. At first sight, it appears that he does not change the origi-
nal image; a closer look though reveals a green banner announcing “I’m
Here,” which is the artist’s addition, plus the place and date of the attack.
In this case, Ziv Koren took the original image, yet Tartakover always adds
an image of himself to the original, wearing a yellow vest as though he took
part in the rescue. He puts on a vest that has the word “artist” printed on it,
instead of “doctor,” “paramedic,” or “police” (see Figure 2.7).
Tartakover uses press images with very strong colors, so much so that the
play of a green banner might constitute all one sees, at first sight, in the style
of a Benetton ad, perhaps echoing the colors of the Palestinian flag.14 However,
once the topic becomes clear, the effect is chilling. “I’m Here” stresses the fact
that terror is everywhere; it might strike you in your favorite café.
In Tartakover’s case, though, choosing to be there, especially given the
artist’s radical left-wing political views, cannot be seen as a mobilization or
the desire to express empathy. There must be more to it than that. In my
opinion, Tartakover reacts here to the radical change we are all facing in the
new era of terror, where breaking news will arrive and images will engulf us
instantly and totally. Privacy-invading news generates the sensation of having
actually been there. There is certainly a very big question as to how artists can
54 ● Dana Arieli-Horowitz
Figure 2.7 David Tartakover, I’m Here, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1994, 2003–2004.
(Based on a photograph by Ziv Koren.)
respond to this phenomenon, as well as whether they can beat the media.
Tartakover responds by choosing to blur, narrow, and almost eliminate the
gap between art and media. He seems to be telling the viewer that in order
to stay relevant, one must react immediately, perhaps suggesting that the
artist is incapable of producing images as powerful as the ones that appear in
the media.
Michal Heiman (b. 1954) says that she has been collecting blood stains,
that is, images of blood from the media for many years, yet during the year
2002, she felt the need to take them out of their immediate media context
and presented her series of numbered blood tests. She took the stains out of
the draws and, as if they were ready-mades, doubled each of them. Thus, in
stressing the color red, she succeeded in imparting to her work a sensational
and horrifying effect. Her “Blood Test No. 5” (series A) is troubling. It
appears the artist did not turn her face away from horror but chose instead
to face it. Yet, unlike Weinstein, it is not clear whose blood is on display.
Removing the blood stain from its context confronts the viewer with its
universal, powerful essences. It is as if she wanted to declare that blood is
Art in the Age of Terror ● 55
that choosing nonaltered, direct media images is at odds with notions regard-
ing the autonomy of art and art as a sophisticated channel of communication.
Rendering art immediate and concrete means taking a risk. It also means
practically narrowing, almost eliminating the gap between media and art.
Those who are not aware of the artists’ political convictions may understand
this transparency as a political manifesto.
Conclusion
A wave of terror has come over Israeli art in the last decade. Research into art’s
response to terrorism demonstrates the technical and stylistic pluralism
prevalent in Israeli art. In certain cases it also demonstrates the almost entirely
voided gap between mass media and art, thus raising troubling questions
regarding the autonomy of art. Possibly this is a fighting retreat conducted by
art in its aim to penetrate a cultural, communicative, and political agenda.
Images pertaining to the definition of direct media art insinuate an aspiration
to hold on to relevance, which is why artists have given up on art’s unique and
complex language. It is possible that we are given an opportunity to witness
art’s clear standing with regard to its failure to deal with horror in an age con-
trolled by the media’s cadence and power. It is also possible that artists fasci-
nated by the terrorist act are willing to embrace provocative and shocking
stances learned from Hirst and others, although this type of justification does
not seem to follow.
As opposed to direct media art, images of the political abstract may be
interpreted on various levels. By describing an unmediated context, they
might lose some of their political relevance, but it is doubtful whether this
will subtract from their value. The fascinating question is, of course, which of
these images will become embedded in collective consciousness throughout
the decades. It seems that this very concession might just guarantee their
place as primary shapers of collective memory in the decades to come.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a theory of cultural trauma. In Cultural trauma
and collective identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., 1–30. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Arieli-Horowitz, Dana. 2005. Creators in overburden: Rabin’s assassination, art and pol-
itics. Jerusalem: Magnes/Hebrew University Press.
Coulter-Smith, Graham, and Maurice Owen, eds. 2005. Art in the age of terrorism.
London: Paul Holberton.
Art in the Age of Terror ● 57
Edelsztein, Sergio. 2006. Doron Solomons’s video works: Mind the gap. Tel Aviv: Center
for Contemporary Art.
Perec, Georges. 1974. Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Editions Galilèe.
Ray, Gene. 2005. Terror and the sublime in art and critical theory. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the torture of others, New York Times Magazine, May
23.
Virilio, Paul. 2004. Art and fear. London: Continuum.
Z̆iz̆ek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the desert of the real: Five essays on September 11 and
related dates. London: Verso.
Notes
1. Terror has always been present in Israeli art. During the early 1970s, Pinchas
Cohen-Gan (b. 1942), then an art student at the Bezalel art school, was exposed
to one of the first waves of terror in Jerusalem. In one of these attacks, he was at
the market buying bananas. A second later, a bomb split the air and the fruit-
seller’s head was blown off. Cohen-Gan has been painting heads ever since.
Dganit Berest has also dealt with terrorists. In her work “TWA” from 1998, she
used images of airplane hijackers.
2. Throughout the years 2002 to 2006, I conducted sixty open, in-depth inter-
views with Israeli artists regarding their views on the interrelations between art
and politics. Half of the interviews were recently published. Unfortunately, just
a fraction of the knowledge and information that enriched those interviews is
discussed in this paper (see Arieli-Horowitz 2005).
3. Spain, Northern Ireland, and, after September 11, the United States are just a
few examples. Recently the Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF] Exhibition Show at the
KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin precipitated a huge debate. This
exhibition focused on German art dealing with the Red Army Faction, which
was responsible for a decade of terror from 1968 to 1977. It includes depictions
of controversial individuals such as Ulrike Meinhoff of the Baader-Meinhof ter-
rorist organization, sometimes with great admiration. Gerhard Richter’s 1988
work “Dead,” exhibited as part of his 18 October 1977 series, was presented at
this exhibition. Benjamin Buchloh’s “Note on October 18, 1977” sheds light on
this debate. Literature on art and terror is just beginning to appear (see Ray
2005; Coulter-Smith 2005).
4. Alexander claims that a cultural trauma occurs when a group of people feels that
they have experienced an event that has marked them deeply. Such an event is
so powerful that it may affect their future behavior (see Alexander 2004).
5. In an interview with the BBC held one year after September 11, Demian Hirst
said that the attacks were “visually stunning” artworks and that the perpetrators
“needed congratulating.” He later apologized. Parts of the interview are quoted
in Charles P. Freund, “The Art of Terror,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 6,
2002. One can only wonder if Hirst would still have made the same claim in
58 ● Dana Arieli-Horowitz
London after the terror acts of July 2005. On Stockhausen, see http://www
.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=14535.
6. Raz has been dealing with barricades since 1992. He started photographing the
roadblocks the Israeli army uses during his service as an officer in 1992. The dis-
sonance between being an artist and a soldier was so strong that he was released
from further service. The roadblocks gradually developed into the tunnel roads
that bypass roads were transformed into during the second Intifada.
7. Guy Raz, “Two Seconds,” 2004–6 (the image is on the cover of the book).
8. The Zaka organization is an ultra-Orthodox organization that voluntarily han-
dles the remains of terror act victims. Gils’s image can be seen at http://
www.archimagazine.com/rbeda.htm
9. This is one of three similar images by Reeb, all entitled “Where are the
Soldiers?”
10. Waked’s image can be seen at http://www.universes-in-universe.de/islam/eng/
2005/10/chic-point/img-05.html. It should be stressed that roadblocks have
become a commonplace theme in Israeli art dealing with the occupation from
the 1990’s onward. Raz’s project, begun in 1992 in Gaza and entitled
“Roadblock Stones,” is probably among the first to deal with the issue. Excerpts
from the project were exhibited in the Studio in the winter of 1995 [no. 67], as
well as in Ha’aretz newspaper. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987,
roadblocks have constituted a common theme, especially in journalists’ photog-
raphy. Among those who concern themselves with this theme are Miki Kratsman,
Pavel Wolberg, and Shai Kremer. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, that
concern has flowed also into artistic photography, video art, and cinema. Thus
Ronen Shamir’s film “Roadblocks,” and Miki Kratsman and Boaz Arad’s video
piece “Untitled” from 2002. This video records thousands of Palestinians
returning to their homes in the Gaza strip through the Erez roadblock.
11. Sodaey’s image can be seen at http://hcc.haifa.ac.il/gallery/overcraft/artists/
MeravSudaey.htm
12. Here Sodaey’s work and the Zaka organization come to mind. Horesh’s images
can be seen at http://www.yoavhoresh.com/viewPhoto.php?dir=photographs/
AFTERMATH&view=large&photo=17
13. Berest’s image can be seen at http://www.harelart.com/kb35.16.jpg
14. The green banner resembles the famous Benetton campaign of the 1980s, with
Oliviero Toscani’s photographs of the banner at its center.
15. One of the bloodstains included in Heiman’s series is a very famous one; it was
found in the pocket of Israeli prime minister Y. Rabin immediately after he was
assassinated in 1995.
16. Heiman’s image can be seen at http://www.maarav.org.il/items/333/ textAreaImages/
6.jpg. In Holding 3, Moti Kimhi is the photographer. The image was taken in
Tel Aviv and appeared in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, June 3, 2001. In
Holding 13, the photographer’s identity is unknown (AP). The image was taken
in Bido and appeared in the Ha’aretz daily news, February 27, 2004.
Art in the Age of Terror ● 59
17. Solomons’s could be seen as paying tribute to Heinrich Böll, Murke’s Collected
Silences from 1955.
18. Solomons’s image can be seen at http://www.alondon.net/control/gfx/news/
paranoya-DORON-SOLOMONS.NO2.jpg.
CHAPTER 3
R
oland Barthes’s famous insight in his La Chambre claire (Camera
Lucida) states that the horror of the photograph is that it certifies
that the corpse is alive. For him, the photograph of his mother signi-
fies that the person portrayed was alive (then), but is already dead (now). The
Barthesian gaze underlines the photograph as temporally twofold, signifying,
for instance, life of the dead. Walter Benjamin refers to the temporality of an
image as dialectical. In an image, the past has the potential to become crys-
tallized into the moment—into a dialectical image—simultaneously with
becoming a part of the mémoire involontaire. The notion of the dialectical
image remains on the historical and theoretical levels, and also on the level of
the configuration in terms of approaching the epistemological questions of
understanding the signs of the present time. My task in this chapter is to
touch on various aspects of our present time by highlighting the significance
of its images. In connection to this, I will also attempt to reveal some of its
epistemology in this sense, that is, to reveal a temporal epistemology of
the image.
In a photographic image, the flow of time is suddenly interrupted. In this
constellation of space and time, the present represents itself (at least) twice.
Firstly, every image becomes a sign of the moment in which the photograph
was taken; secondly, it is attached to the moment in which the viewer looks
at the image. Experiences of historical time, or at least specific parts of it,
might be described through vision, as series of images we have confronted
through times. In this sense, it is notable that, particularly during the last
decade, we have been increasingly bombarded by images of the global media.
We are confronted with more and more images of dead bodies, snapshots of
62 ● Kia Lindroos
women and children being carried out of the ruins of bombed houses, sui-
cide bombers who leave video messages outlining their imminent attacks.
The experience of death, which has been portrayed, for instance, by modern
artists such as Damien Hirst since the 1990s and modern philosophers such
as Martin Heidegger since the 1940s, is a reflection that seems to be repre-
sented in the public arena more startlingly and strikingly than ever before.
We have seen images from concentration camps to Bosnian mass graves, the
decomposing and dismembered bodies of soldiers and civilians left in the
wake of the attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and so on.
These images are imprinted on our minds and, as such, they are increasingly
imprinted on the visual memory of our time, as Dana Arieli-Horowitz has
well noted (Horowitz 2006; see also her chapter in this volume).
The experience of any form of temporality is inherently entangled with
the vicious circle of reasons and causes, which continues to question the
political rationality of the twenty-first century. Jean Baudrillard has repeat-
edly claimed that “postmodern” images are no longer linked to real events.
Instead, we have lost the principle of reality, and in this manner reality
becomes envy of fiction (cf. Baudrillard 2006, 45). However, it seems as
though reality has now taken the lead: the events of September 11, 2001,
were a surprising sign of the real for most of the witnesses to them. Even
Baudrillard seemed to be surprised when confronted with the terrorist attacks
in 2001; he views the images as if confronted with the possibility of such an
event for the very first time. He writes that the uniqueness of an event lies in
the fact that it extends beyond aesthetics and morality (59). It was this spe-
cific occasion that awakened his sense of the reality of an event. For him, the
sign of the connection between image and reality is the sense of fear.
Baudrillard writes, “The first moment is everything” (61).
Examining images of terror might help us to prove the point that the tem-
poral ambiguity of the now and the then is worth considering. Terrorist acts
are both a cause and result of terror itself; the political phenomenon of terror
and most of its causes lie far behind the scenes that are represented in the
images of it. The discussion of terror often moves on the level at which one
attempts to document acts of terror or reproduce elements of it through
visual images, media-shots, documentaries, or Internet blogs. However, I
begin and end my thoughts with references to terror expressed through the
concept of aura. In doing so, I pose the question of whether there is such a
thing as the possibility of shared temporal and political experience. In the
background of this question is Benjamin’s claim of the fracturing of experi-
ence during the nineteenth century (Benjamin 1933b, 214; 1936b, 439).
This split is related to the collapse of narrative forms in Benjamin’s study of
The Aura of Terror? ● 63
the systematic distribution of fear and horror that connects “image” and
“reality,” as Baudrillard observes, for political purposes. It establishes the
political experience of the present time. As noted earlier, I intend to discuss
the possibility of reaching out to some aspects of our present experience by
examining the idea of visual representation through the concept of aura. I am
aware, however, that this question creates a rather strange paradox, and with
this paradox, I intend to point out how Benjamin opens conditions for mod-
ern aesthetic experience.
One of the early “definitions” of the concept of aura comes from Karl
Kraus. He writes, “The closer I look, the greater the distance appears between
us” (modified by Benjamin 1939, 647). This is one of the starting points in
understanding visual experience: in order to be able to look closely, one has
to create a sense of distance between oneself and the image to be viewed,
which is precisely where the “dividing tool” of aura comes into play and
opens up a space for a specific ethos of seeing (that I will specify in the next
section). Here, distance becomes a sign of reason in the midst of the irra-
tionality of the events. The impossibility, disbelief, and mythical meanings
given to the surrounding images leads us to question whether the things we
see in images are as real as the events they portray or whether they are a part
of the “imagery of terror” that is already building up a logic of its own, indi-
vidually from the spectators.
Benjamin provides another example of aura in relation to the experience
of the landscape and nature, as he describes the dualistic and simultaneous
sense of distance and presence. The thought-image refers to the simultaneous
perception of distant mountains and the branch of a tree by a relaxed
observer of nature on a Sunday afternoon.1 This describes the unique phe-
nomenon of experiencing distance, although the object of focus is right in
front of our eyes. In this case, the distance refers not only to spatial and tem-
poral distance but also to the ambiguous distance between an experience and
its possibility. By using such an example, I am not claiming that images of ter-
ror might have anything in common with the sense of relaxation and experi-
ence of nature as such. Rather, I understand the concept of aura, through
Benjamin’s example, as the ability to sense the distance of a present experi-
ence, however close the perception of the media might appear. This distance
refers firstly to the attempt to reason and secondly to the attempt to remain
conscious of the manipulation of the gaze, that is, a sign of the artificially pro-
jected aura, of which I will give an example later on.
Examining the visual representations of politics adds to our understanding
of the fact that time is the constitutive moment of representation. If we fol-
low the postmodern theory of representation, there is nothing to represent
The Aura of Terror? ● 65
since thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault have presented the notion of the
disappearance of the “original” moment. Representation itself is understood
as constructive in relation to the ways in which we conceive political, social,
and aesthetic realities. Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the destruction of the
Twin Towers in 2001 imply that this specific act of terror positions the event
before the representation (Baudrillard 2006, 51). This causes a rupture in any
claim of the simulacra of media representation. The notion that the sense of
spectatorship and the object of the spectator’s gaze are supposed to move in a
new direction after 9/11 is an exception among visual representations of pol-
itics, since Baudrillard understands the visual representation of the events as
a real event in itself. Reality and representation are closely intertwined, as the
terror attack is essentially a visual experience and not part of the simulation.
In fact, the reality of death is an interruptive moment in the simulation.
An act of terror that intends to maximize the number of casualties with
the suicide of the perpetrators includes an aspect that escapes the conceptual-
ization—it escapes the rational. The contingency of the time and place of ter-
rorist attacks is even more contingent than the systematic destruction of the
Holocaust. In this sense, what we are seeing is the gap, the irrationality of the
moment, which escapes the attempts of rationalization by its very existence.2
This gap/sublime moment is something that appears quite often in politi-
cal aesthetics, since it points precisely toward the ambiguity of experience and
the impossibility of representing the moment—any moment—in its “entirety.”
When we look at Benjamin’s conceptualization, the moment becomes signif-
icant as a sign of singularity. From my viewpoint, the ambiguity of the sub-
lime moment actually reflects the character of Benjamin’s concept of aura.
In Benjamin’s early work, the idea of experience and the moment of expe-
riencing are closely related to the terms of knowledge and truth, and the
problems related to their expression.3 The issues of the truth, origins, and
limits of knowledge are also significantly present in the conception of aura.
The background of Benjamin’s approach is delineated by its philosophical
confrontation with Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. In the following, I will
highlight only some issues related to this confrontation.
Critique as Judgment
Kant’s aesthetic theory, in which the attributes of beauty and “sublimity” are
transferred to the subject as the experience of pleasure or displeasure, occu-
pies an established position that is still valued today. In his Third Critique,
Kant describes how the “pure judgment of taste” is neither interested in nor
intrigued by the existence of the object (Kant 1799/1993). For him, free
66 ● Kia Lindroos
beauty is pleasurable, because its perception assures the subject of his or her
cognitive ability, and it is achieved only when the judgment of taste retains its
sensuous charm and moral connotations. For Benjamin, this is not the case,
since he denies the possibility of making timeless judgments. Instead, judg-
ment comes closer to the issue of critique as an intellectual attitude toward
one’s “own” time.4 Here is the moment of perception (including the possibil-
ity of critique) that I call the ethos of seeing.
Within Benjamin’s conception of critique, both the subject and object of
perception are interwoven in terms of the specific temporal character of per-
ceived time and the time of perception.5 Unlike Kant, Benjamin thinks about
the formation of judgments as “free” from nontemporal moral connotations
and instead, he includes a moment of critique, as an aspect of subjective ethos.
Thus, as a response to the Kantian exclusion of the subject, Benjamin intro-
duces subjectivity and temporality as part of the aesthetic judgment and
critique (Benjamin 1940, 1247). For Benjamin, truth exists an sich in the sin-
gular phenomena, but if and how it is perceived depends on the perceiver
(1925, 210–12). Also, the attention paid to temporality introduces a signifi-
cant element in the concept of critique: the attention to time and the
moment of history is also part of its ethos. Any judgment, for instance one
taking the form of critique, is bound with a context that is formed by visual
perception; technological means of representation; and aesthetic, political,
and historical contexts.
For Benjamin, it is possible to recover the “truth” of a moment in a way
similar to that in which he later describes historical-philosophical and tem-
poral moments—as including the possibility of the moment of salvation
(Erlösung).6 This notion adds a theological aspect to the characteristic of the
aesthetic experience. The relationship between history and redemption lacks
the aspect of mediation and thus establishes a rupture in the linearly under-
stood course of history. The moment of salvation can thus be as simple as the
mere remembrance of the past or salvation of the future. It establishes the
image of reality and meaning for events, which are otherwise seen only as flu-
ently occurring and passing with the flow of time. Particularly in his “Theses
on the Concept of History,” Benjamin emphasizes the past as being an image,
which may be associated but not identified with a graphic or photographic
image (Benjamin 1940, 695).7
For Benjamin, aesthetic judgment is a temporal matter, a moment of cri-
tique and experience. As such, it is also a transient and transforming mat-
ter, although the question of judgment does ultimately belong to the realm
of epistemology.8 The emphasis of the moment of authenticity, which is
only approachable as an image (Bild), refers to the concept of origin, which
The Aura of Terror? ● 67
Benjamin describes aura as the “cover” under which the uniqueness of the
work of art is hidden (1936a, 368; 1922; 1959). With the first notion of
aura, Benjamin notes that in the transfer of a personal aura to its reception by
an audience, one can artificially, for instance, with technological means, con-
struct a feeling of identification with the presence of an actor projected on
screen. It was precisely this possibility to create aura through reproduction
that was utilized in fascist aesthetics. In the context of the 1930s, the focus
was to create mass propaganda and identification with the politicized values,
for instance, in images of nation or race.
The political interpretation of art notes an important change in the pro-
duction of art, particularly when its authenticity suffers; its social function is
seen as being overturned. Benjamin suggests that the transfer from rituals
toward politics discloses the moment of the new, from which the rituality of
aura is distinctly absent, and that art is thus brought closer to the perceiver
and brought down to earth from its mythical stance (Benjamin 1936a, 357).
The understanding of political art in terms of rituality (the first conception
of political art) is directly associated with fascist politics that, in Benjamin’s
view, continues the ritual value of art in terms of its praxis of the aestheti-
cization of politics (ästhetisierung der Politik in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter
seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936a, 382). This interpretation out-
lines the idea of modernity as an “era” of reproducibility and the emerging
differences in political and aesthetic representation. Benjamin’s use of the
term aesthetic, particularly in his claim on the aestheticization of politics, is
notable due to its specific reference. This notion refers to the representations
of unification and similitude, which are inherent in the construction of an
ideological “mass.” It is the ideologized mass that is the object of a fascist aes-
theticization of politics.9
The German National Socialists’s use of traditional values for ideological
purposes led to the establishment of an ideological interpretation of tradi-
tion, origins, and rituals. For instance, the eternal idea of cultic art was clearly
reproduced in fascist politics. In his Theorien der deutschen Faschismus,
Benjamin describes the cultic element of war as expressed by the idea of “eter-
nal” war (Benjamin 1930, 241, emphasis added). As such, artists not only
expressed the ideals of the National Socialist aesthetics but also participated
in the creation of the new human ideal and “purified” human being, thus
playing a crucial role in the construction of the “eternal” Germany.
As Benjamin understands the cult as being essentially tied to the concept
of aura, he refers to how traditional works of art were created as props in
magic and later religious rituals. This historical origin means that if the tradi-
tional meaning of art is retained, it cannot be approached as free from its rit-
ualistic function (1936a, 356). Only by reconceptualizing art can it be
70 ● Kia Lindroos
Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the
state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it repre-
sents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very
distance that it takes with respect to those functions. It is political insofar as it
frames not only works or monuments, but also a specific space-time senso-
rium, as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart, of being
inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of, etc. It is political as its own
practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices,
manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a com-
monsense, which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sen-
sorium. (2004)
Thus, Rancière also refers to the aspects of time and space as creating the spe-
cific aspects of politics in art. As he puts it, “Politics is . . . the configuration
of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the set-
ting of objects posed as ‘common’ and of subjects to whom the capacity is rec-
ognized to designate these objects and discuss about them” (2004). First and
foremost, for Rancière, politics seems to envelop the sphere of experience, the
reality of common objects and the capacity of the subjects.
Since Rancière makes explicit reference to Benjamin, I will compare some
aspects of both of their concepts of art and politics. There are obvious simi-
larities in their connection of the political aspect in art to the time/space
experience, rather than to the representation of political issues as such. One
of the obvious differences between the two, however, is related to the discus-
sion of the problem of the common and its relationship to the “common
sensorium.”
For Benjamin, although the problem of the common is extremely central
to his work, it is not explicitly discussed. For instance, his view of the con-
nection between the decay of aura and changes in perception was related to
how he saw the masses (die Masse) as related to new forms of perception.
Benjamin was interested in the ways in which the masses were distributed
through the changes of individual perception and experience. To highlight
this, he distinguished between that of a compact and more passive idea of the
masses and that of the revolutionary and more individual idea of the masses
(for instance, Benjamin 1936a, 370; 1939, 618). In other words, as an out-
growth of technological reproducibility (of art, but later also media)
Benjamin notes how the forms of perception change. Firstly, new forms of
72 ● Kia Lindroos
perception appear to forge a “passive” and compact mass or group whose gaze
is “easy to manipulate.” This is the critique of the Frankfurt school. However,
what makes Benjamin different is that he also points out the positive aspects
of the changed perception, the new forms of art (avant-garde) and the impact
of film/media that made one “see differently.” So, there is no homogeneous
mass perception, but the “fragmented” masses that were to see things, also in
real life, differently than before.
The problem of the sense of the common and its relation to aesthetics
appears in the work of a number of thinkers. It is dealt with, for example,
throughout Lyotard’s work in general and his discussion on Kant’s sensus com-
munis (Kant 1993, sec. 40) in particular. Lyotard deals with the sense of com-
munity by posing the question of what sensus would serve to bring a
community together. Lyotard transforms the idea of community from a feel-
ing of coherence to the question of its intelligibility (Lyotard 1992, 2). In
doing so, he provides us with a Kantian reading of the problem.
Rancière more or less seems to accept the common as something that “is
embodied in a common sensorium,” which is where he most clearly differs
from Benjamin. The idea of common experience and perception is some-
thing that Benjamin explicitly questions with his notion of aura. Benjamin
claims that the fragmenting of the feeling of the community and, for exam-
ple, the perceived sense of community emerged during modernity. The
Benjaminian reconstruction of the community and the possibility of com-
mon experience calls for the reconceptualization of both its meaning/sensus
and its feeling/coherence (Lindroos 2001). The common, as nonexistent
matter an sich, always requires legitimation, and it should be reworked in
every temporal situation. Furthermore, the “social” does not exist in Benjamin’s
work as such, but, rather, it requires legitimation in time and space. For
Benjamin, it is possible to reconstruct social coherence through tradition.
However, this leads to the problem of legitimation in an era in which the pre-
vious conception of knowledge no longer reflects the actual historical, social,
and aesthetic conditions.
The question of this legitimation of the common (or community) is prob-
lematized to a certain extent in contemporary political philosophy, for
instance by Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and
Benedict Anderson. Yet, Jacques Rancière seems to take the community for
granted, for example, regarding his conception of the politics of aesthetics in
relation to this question. For Rancière, politics begins “when they who have
‘no time’ to do anything else than their work take that time that they have not
in order to make themselves visible as sharing in a common world and prove
that their mouth indeed emits common speech instead of merely voicing
The Aura of Terror? ● 73
pleasure or pain.” He calls the redistribution of times and spaces, places and
identities, framing and reframing the visible and the invisible, of telling
speech from noise, the partition of the sensible (Rancière 2004).
Interestingly, Rancière notes that “politics and art are not two separate and
permanent realities about which one should ask whether they have to be con-
nected or not”; he also refers to democracy and the theater as two forms of the
same partition of the sensible, as “two forms of heterogeneity, that are dis-
missed at the same time to frame the republic as the ‘organic life’ of the com-
munity” (Rancière 2004).
The question can also be examined from exactly the opposite perspective,
beginning from the singular and the fracture (partition). In other words, sin-
gle images can be conceptualized, for example, as temporal entities that
include the essential characteristics of both their historical and political con-
texts, yet retain their own temporality. Now, to make a temporal leap, one
might describe the war on terror as a movement that is tied to rituals and
cults. Its goal is the destruction of the “opposing forces” and this conflict
departs from the supposition that the parties to this conflict share no com-
mon ground or commonly held experiences. As such, we could ask what
“community” is actually the target of terror? My claim, modifying the
Benjaminian premises here, is that the community (the sense of the com-
mon) is created here through the opposing and conflicting activities: both the
terrorist acts as much as the military retaliations against them. The sense of
the common, as fragile and temporal as it might be, is created through the
threats, fears, and other manifestations of power. The social divisions between
good and evil, friend and enemy are constructed in order to reinforce the nar-
rative around the issue of terror.
as they hunted Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 terror attacks. No one knew
whether Osama was dead or alive, and there were a number of attempts to
produce an artificial aura around him. He became a cultic figure with the
support of contemporary commercial market forces: Osama t-shirts, leaflets,
newspaper articles, and so on, which all supported the cult of bin Laden.
Despite the images that constitute cultic figures, there are plenty of indi-
cations of the authenticity of both the experiences and suffering of the peo-
ple. We could pose the very legitimate question of how the contemporary
spectator is supposed to approach the tragic drama that is being played out in
the media today. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, for
example, has pointed out a number of different forms of the expression of
public power. Firstly, it is the theater of public, judicial torture, and execu-
tion. This is “great tragic theatre,” as Foucault describes it, and it takes place
on the public stage. Secondly, there is the theater of discipline and surveil-
lance: the former is openly displaying power at work, while the latter hides it
under layers of moral-political, legal, and philosophical justifications and
ideals. This kind of theater takes place in a number of smaller, melodramatic
theaters that are distributed throughout the society (Foucault 1980, 16–24).
Both of these forms of exercising power are present in the visual represen-
tations of terror. However, the prerequisite concerning the ethos of experienc-
ing the images is that the spectators be understood as actors, as participants
in this bloodshed, and as part of the forces of destruction. The public cannot
dominate this theater from a safe distance, but must actually and actively take
part in what is happening on the “stage.” This is a visual space of cross-refer-
ence in which every spectator is also a spectacle and every spectacle is also a
spectator. This is the image-space characterized by Benjamin. The need to
participate is visible at least in the fragile moment of critique. Indeed, one
cannot portray an image of the whole picture; rather, we must make due with
single representations that express the will to take part in the events and the
ambiguous dilemma of truth, presence, and absence.
For Jacques Rancière, the “politics of aesthetics” rests on the paradox of
the linkage of two opposite equalities as ultimately shaping the two main
forms of “politics.” I have explicitly used the conception of aura to signify this
original paradox. The first form of the political aims at connecting the two
equalities, as in Benjamin’s interpretation, highlights political art in terms
of rituality and process of identification with politically constructed values.
For Rancière, “this means transforming the freedom and equality of the
autonomous aesthetic sphere” into a collective existence in which they will no
longer be a matter of form and appearance, but will be embodied in the mate-
riality of everyday experience (2004). I see this notion as closely connected to
The Aura of Terror? ● 75
what Benjamin meant, by the way, in which the (illusion) of the autonomy of
art disappears already through the process of reproducibility (1936a, 362).
This means that the social and political conditions of works of art, and aes-
thetics in general, are in a process of transformation within any era of repro-
ducibility, and in fact, the aesthetic dimension in the social and political
sphere (that is already extant), becomes more apparent.
The second form of the political disconnects politics from aesthetics. For
Rancière, “it disconnects the free and equal space of aesthetic experience from
the infinite field of the equivalence of art and life. To the self-suppressing pol-
itics of art becoming life, it opposes a politics of the resistant form. . . . The
egalitarian potential is enclosed in the dissensuality of the work, in its belong-
ing to an autonomous sphere, indifferent to any program of social transfor-
mation or any participation in the adornment of prosaic life. Political
avant-gardism and artistic avant-gardism would fit together out of their very
lack of connection” (2004). Benjamin draws a similar, but not identical rup-
ture that the avant-garde manifests, especially when one tries to understand
the connection between art and politics. I have pointed out ways in which
Benjamin indicates the rupture that the avant-garde (here through the exam-
ple of Dada) creates, in which Benjamin observes that the resistance is a form
of politics per se. It is the resistance and rupture that forms the connection
between the political and aesthetic realms, and not the lack of connection, as
it seems to be for Rancière.
with a level of courage that might lead us to overcome the “danger” within
historical images (Benjamin 1940, 695). From my point of view, this requires
the acceptance of the ambiguity of our times, portrayed through violence, rit-
uals, cult, and the experience of temporality in its chromatic depth.
References
Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. Sublime historical experience. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Arieli-Horowitz, Dana. 2006. Art and terror: The Israeli case. Paper presented at the
symposium Art and Terror, May 29–June 1, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Barthes, Roland. 1980. La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Camera lucida:
Reflections on photography). Seuil: Gallimard.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. Terrorismin henki (The spirit of terrorism and requiem for the
twin towers). Trans. Olli Sinivaara. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto.
Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften (GS). Eds. Tiedemann, Rolf und
Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1940. Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, GS I.2.
———. 1940. Die neue Thesen, GS I.3.
———. 1939. Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, GS I.2.
———. 1936a. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
Zweite Fassung, GS VII.1.
———. 1936b. Der Erzähler, GS II.2.
———. 1933a. Lehre vom ähnlichen, GS II.1.
———. 1933b. Erfahrung und Armut, GS II.1.
———. 1932. Aus einer kleinen Rede über Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Geburtstag
gehalten, GS II.3.
———. 1930. Theorien der deutschen Faschismus, GS III.
———. 1929. Der Surrealismus, GS II.I.
———. 1925. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels GS I.1.
———. 1922. Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, GS I.1.
———. 1919. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, GS I.1.
———. 1916. Über dies Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen. GS II.1.
Caygill, Howard. 1998. Walter Benjamin: The colour of experience. London and New
York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Tarkkailla ja rangaista (Discipline and punish: The birth of
the prison). Keuruu: Otava.
Kant, Immanuel. 1799/1993. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Felix Meiner Verlag: Hamburg.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1992. Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten
(Futures past: On the semantics of historical time). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Lindroos, Kia. 2006. Benjamin’s moment. Redescriptions 10: 115–33.
———. 2001. Scattering community: Benjamin on experience, narrative and history.
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The Aura of Terror? ● 79
Other Sources
Hirst, Damien. 1997. I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one
to one, always, forever, now. London: Monacelli.
Notes
1. “Was ist eigentlich Aura? Ein sonderbares Gespinst aus Raum und Zeit; einma-
lige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag. An einem Sommernachmit-
tag ruhend einem Gebirgszug am Horizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der sein
Schatten auf den ruhenden wirft—das heißt die Aura dieser Berge, dieses
Zweiges atmen” (Benjamin 1936a, 355).
2. The aesthetic gap might be approached through the concept of the sublime.
However, I refer here only generally to Kenneth Burke’s concept of the sublime,
which is further investigated, for instance, by Frank Ankersmit (2005).
3. Especially in Benjamin 1922 and 1925.
4. I would underline Howard Caygill’s interpretation of Benjamin’s conception of
“immanent Critique” here (Caygill 1998, 34–72).
5. This idea of critique may be compared to Benjamin’s concept of an image-space
(Bildraum), in which the distinctive limits between signified/signifier and aes-
thetic subject/object seem to break down in intellectual reflection (Benjamin
1929, 302, 309).
6. I discuss this concept more thoroughly in Lindroos 2006.
7. Benjamin’s concept of image is actually quite extensive, as it also refers to inter-
nal and mental images, such as images of memory or acts of knowledge
(Erkenntnis).
8. This discussion is outlined, for instance, in Benjamin’s dissertation (1919) and
in the Goethe essay (1922).
9. The ways in which Benjamin constructs the idea of aestheticization of politics
is tied to the question in which he sees the “masses” (die Masse) to be formed
during the times of technical reproducibility of art. Here, his concept of the
“masses” is quite different from that of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
10. Damien Hirst (b. 1965) curated the widely acclaimed “Freeze” exhibition in
1988 while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College. Hirst graduated from
Goldsmiths in 1989, and he has since gone on to become one of the most
famous living British artists. Moreover, In and Out of Love (1991) was an instal-
lation for which a gallery was filled with hundreds of live tropical butterflies,
80 ● Kia Lindroos
Fictionalizing Terror
CHAPTER 4
I
n the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, one often
heard people say that nothing would be the same again: something terri-
fyingly new had erupted, changing the political landscape forever. Yet at
the same time that this particular act of terror was experienced as the shock
of the new, there were attempts by theorists almost immediately to discover
its larger meaning by going back to the past, and since 2001, a number of
books on the subject have been published, one example being Terry
Eagleton’s Holy Terror (2005). Some have turned especially to Dostoyevsky’s
great political novel The Possessed, also called The Devils or Demons, with its
portrayal of a group of nihilists, in order to gain insight into the motivations
underlying present-day terrorists. Notable among these would be André
Glucksmann, whose 2002 Dostoïevski à Manhattan proclaims on its back
cover that “il faut sous-titrer CNN avec Dostoïevski” (we must subtitle CNN
with Dostoyevsky).
On the face of it, the relevance of Dostoyevsky to twenty-first century
Islamicist terrorism is not self-evident, for the nineteenth-century Russian
nihilists he describes were revolutionaries wanting to create a new order based
on human reason, and the members of al Qaeda are religious fundamentalists
wanting the restoration of an older order under God. Yet some evident paral-
lels do exist. One is that Dostoyevsky portrays the leaders of the Russian
nihilists as young men with privileged, even aristocratic, backgrounds. There
has been an influential analysis of September 11 within the Left, one associated
84 ● Margaret Heller
most with the work of Noam Chomsky, which holds that it was a compre-
hensible act of retribution for the economic inequalities of the world order
favoring the West. Yet this particular instance of terrorism was not perpe-
trated by the materially dispossessed. Bin Laden, as we all know, was born
into a tremendously wealthy and influential family with close connections to
Saudi royalty, and the al Qaeda terrorists often seem to have been the children
of professionals. Something else moved them, something beyond the ratio-
nality of purely economic motives. It would seem that Dostoyevsky’s novel,
through its powerful examination of the spiritual and psychic dimensions of
the modern condition, might be a better source for understanding that which
exceeds the motivations recognized by contemporary political science, depen-
dent as it is upon the calculus of rational choices for its analysis.
The psychological roots of terror are typically identified in one of two
ways, both employing the language of Nietzsche. The first is that of ressenti-
ment: terrorism is held to be fueled by envy of the success of the West and
feelings of cultural humiliation. This argument is made most notably by
Bernard Lewis. The second is that of nihilism: terrorism is held to be the con-
sequence of the loss of values in late modernity. This is claimed by Glucks-
mann himself, who argues that nihilism is characteristic of modern Western
culture and that it has spread everywhere; we are in an era of “nihilisme mon-
dialisé,” in which only death gives meaning. Even terrorism motivated by reli-
gion is an expression of nihilism, for terrorists act as if there are no limits to
human activity (Glucksmann 2003, 1). Whether ressentiment or nihilism is
the culprit, what should be remarked is that both theories entail claims about
“the West.” In the first case, terrorism is said to be a reaction against the
West’s success, the vengeance of an alien culture seeking to reassert itself. In
the second case, modern terrorism, even that of radical Islamicism, is said to
be a symptom of a West whose values have been globally disseminated by its
technology, economy, and culture. The claim that I am most concerned with
here, one that links terrorism to a nihilism arising from the impasses of
Western modernity, is an instance of the latter. But one way or another, we
find a whole range of Orientalisms and Occidentalisms, or of stereotypes of
both East and West, invoked by those who seek to discover the roots of terror.
In Dostoyevsky’s writings, there are moments that would indicate the author’s
support for both tendencies, but his views cannot be reduced to either.
nineteenth century in Russia. They were, in fact, coined roughly in the same
period, the time of the French Revolution. The first use of terrorism seems to
have been in the 1790s, and it then referred to the program of the French rev-
olutionary state (Laqueur 1977, 6). While in contemporary usage, terrorism
was typically used as the label for exceptional and nonstate violence, the
Jacobins believed that terror was a legitimate tool of government. Nihilism,
in contrast, seems to have first been introduced as a philosophical term. In
1799, Friedrich Jacobi used it to characterize Enlightenment thought as a
whole and Kantian critical reason in particular, which he argued reduced
being to nothingness (di Giovanni 2006). Then a connection between the
philosophy of nihilism and the politics of terror was made by Joseph de
Maistre, a Catholic conservative, who argued that the former’s assertion of
human freedom from authority had, as its necessary consequence, the latter.
Maistre’s denunciations of theophobia, “the insurrection against God,” nihilism
(rienisme), and any belief in political progress due to human enlightenment,
were especially influential in Russia as the result of his period of exile in
that country (Billington 1970, 272). Friedrich Schlegel, another figure of
Catholic Romanticism who had a considerable impact on Russian thought,
also makes clear the practical consequences of nihilism. He writes in his
Philosophy of History that the devil, the principle of negation, “since the com-
mencement of his emancipation in modern times,” has become the spirit of
the age itself, for now eternity is devalued in relation to the temporal world
(Schlegel 1883, 475). The modern assertion of human freedom has resulted
in nothing else than “bloody warfare, and a fatal struggle of life and death,
protracted beyond a century” (475). Only religion will save us: “Christianity
is the emancipation of the human race from the bondage of that inimical
spirit who denies God, and, as far as in him likes, leads all created intelli-
gences astray” (474).
Maistre and Schlegel express, and historically helped develop, the tradi-
tionalist antimodernist narrative, which mapped the orthodox Christian
account of sin, being individual man’s preference of his own will to God’s,
onto mankind’s actions in history, and which has had enormous reach ever
since. According to this account, the Enlightenment as a whole (or the
French Revolution, or modernity, or the West) has turned away from God
and elevated humanity in His place, wrongly convinced that it could bring
about the good autonomously and, instead, bringing about evil; Glucks-
mann, who applies this to contemporary terrorism, is but a recent teller of
this tale. In fact, the traditionalist narrative has led to a number of misread-
ings of politics and art because it disregards the specificity and complexity of
historical moments. It also has functioned to deflect attention from the
86 ● Margaret Heller
extent to which religion and the reaction against modernity are themselves
implicated in a number of resorts to terror.
European conservatives the links between nihilism, terror, and the Russian
soul (Bonnett 2004, 43). Thus, while nihilism in Russia was associated with
radical Western ideologies such as Jacobinism, in Europe it was attributed to
a certain Russian type of radicalism: characterized as Asiatic and ruthless,
nihilism became an attribute of the Slavic, rather than the Westernized, intel-
lectual. This style of culturalist or ethnocentric analysis is repeated today in
many explanations for September 11. Islamic culture and/or the Arabic char-
acter have become the key to understanding current terrorism in the way that
the Slavic soul was invoked earlier.
Dostoyevsky’s Demons
In The Possessed, it is a group of revolutionaries belonging to the generation of
the sixties who are called nihilists by Dostoyevsky. They possess no common
ideology, but rather display a range of theoretical positions. Yet the members
of this group, living in a provincial town, systematically work to destabilize
the social order by disrupting the relations between the classes, between the
generations, and between the sexes, all of which culminate in arson and mur-
der. Their leader, Peter Verkhovensky, decides to solidify the loyalty of his fol-
lowers by having them participate in the killing of one of their number whom
Peter has falsely accused of treachery, just as Nechaev did in real life. While
The Possessed is evidently Dostoyevsky’s analysis of the causes and significance
of the Nachaev conspiracy, in an issue of his Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky
gives a more complex account of his intentions as an author. He did not try
to recreate the actual Nechaev in Peter Verkhovensky. Instead, he writes, “I
meant to put this question and to answer it as clearly as possible in the form
of a novel: how, in our contemporaneous, transitional and peculiar society,
are the Nechaievs, not Nechaiev himself made possible? And how does it
happen that these Nechaievs eventually manage to enlist followers—the
Nechaievtzi?” (Dostoyevsky 1971b, 142–43). Dostoyevsky goes on, “And in
my novel The Possessed I made the attempt to depict the manifold and het-
erogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most
naive people to take part in the perpetration of so monstrous a villainy.” This
attempt was a deeply personal one, for Dostoyevsky claims that in his youth
he himself had been on his way to becoming like one of the Nechaevtzi before
he was arrested and imprisoned (147).
Unlike his other fiction, Dostoyevsky wrote The Possessed with avowedly
polemical intentions: it is what the Russians called a “tendentious novel.” He
proclaims, in a letter in 1870, that “I want to speak out quite openly in this
book with no ogling of the younger generation” (Dostoyevsky 1961, 211).
Yet in the novel, he interprets the terrorizing activities of the nihilists as the
90 ● Margaret Heller
The main character of The Possessed, insofar as his story begins and ends it,
is Peter’s father, Stephen Verkhovensky, who, along with many of the others,
can be regarded as personifying an aspect of Dostoyevsky himself. Here he is
a double of the author as a representative of the generation of the forties. An
ineffectual and vain pseudoscholar and freethinker, Mr. Verkhovensky is
maintained by Mrs. Stavrogin, a local landowner who is trying to keep up to
date with modern thought. He, in common with the rest of his generation,
betrays the youth who are entrusted to him. Having spent his early years in
Europe, a fact that is significant in itself, he abandons his infant son Peter to
be brought up by distant relatives and subsequently robs him of property
willed to him by his mother. This most unsuitable teacher is chosen by Mrs.
Stavrogin to educate her son, Nicholas. As a result of the overblown roman-
ticism of his opinions, his general neglect of his responsibilities, and his inap-
propriate familiarity with both Nicholas and Peter, both boys turn out to be
monsters: Peter is full of contempt and cruel mischief, and Nicholas tries to
compensate for his inability to feel deeply through dissipation and violence.
In different ways, both “sons” are nihilists, representatives of the genera-
tion of the sixties: Peter is the Nechaev figure who claims to be the agent of a
vast underground revolutionary organization. Despite his role in instigating
both the murder and the arson, he is the only one of the group who escapes
unscathed. Nicholas is the aristocratic radical, in many ways like Bakunin,
but cold instead of passionate. He is both one of the elect and monstrous, “a
bearer of [the intelligentsia’s] prophetic hopes” (Dostoyevsky 1971a, 421)
and a great sinner who has committed terrible crimes. In the end of the novel,
Nicholas kills himself, and he reveals in his suicide note that he has come to
realize the nature of his, and his generation’s, situation. As Nicholas puts it,
“He who loses his ties with his native soil loses his gods—that is, all his aims.
One can go on arguing about anything forever, but from me nothing has
come but negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Everything has
always been petty and lifeless” (667).
Mr. Verkhovensky, on the other hand, although he also dies at the end of
the novel, is redeemable, belonging as he does to the older generation of
romantics and liberals. As misguided and harmful as his actions have been, he
has within him the capacity to love. On his deathbed, he comes to under-
stand Russia through the parable in Luke’s gospel about the man possessed by
devils. Jesus frees the man by casting his demons into a herd of swine; the
swine become maddened, throw themselves off a cliff, and are drowned. Mr.
Verkhovensky finds in this a parallel of the situation of Russia: the liberals of
the forties, such as himself, and the nihilists of the sixties, such as Peter and
Nicholas, are like the swine; they have taken into themselves all the devils
which have possessed Russia, “our great and beloved invalid,” for centuries.
92 ● Margaret Heller
This is all part of a higher plan for Russia’s ultimate purification and redemp-
tion. Mr. Verkhovensky prophesies, “We shall cast ourselves down, the raving
and the possessed, from the cliff into the sea and shall all be drowned, and
serves us right, for that is all we are good for. But the sick man will be healed
and will sit at the feet of Jesus, and all will look at him and be amazed”
(648). In this passage, it is clear that the nihilists are not themselves the
demons, as is commonly claimed, but rather are those whom demons pos-
sess. Those who have lost their connection with the Russian soil and the
Russian people by adopting foreign ideas and ways of life are dispossessed of
their proper spirituality and thus open to possession by evil. Yet this evil does
not prevail. The attempts by nihilists to destroy results only in futile self-
destruction; their passing, Mr. Verkhovensky is claiming, will ultimately free
Russia so that it can at last be itself, and even, he suggests, be a light to oth-
ers. Here, he gives voice to the opinion of the nationalist Slavophiles, one
shared by Dostoyevsky, that Russia had a world destiny to surpass and guide
the West, a civilization spiritually stunted and thus easily given over to cor-
ruption (Billington 1970, 317).
Dostoyevsky’s Occidentalism
If the demons are not the progressive intellectuals themselves but, instead,
what possess them, then does Dostoyevsky think that they are Western ideas?
In their 2004 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Ian Buruma
and Avishai Margalit argue that Dostoyevsky is blinded by his “Occidentalism,”
an ideology made up of false and negative generalizations about the West.
They write, “He is convinced that the West is committed to scientism, the
belief that society can be engineered like the Crystal Palace. For him,
imported scientism and utilitarianism constitute a dangerously deluded ide-
ology. . . . We might share Dostoyevsky’s view of human behavior, but his
view of the West as . . . driven by nothing but arid rationalism, is a dehu-
manizing Occidentalist distortion” (Buruma and Margalit 2004, 98).
But this characterization of Dostoyevsky as being simply anti-Western, or
of him believing that it is Western ideas that are the source of evil, does not
really work. For Western culture is not something foreign or external to
Dostoyevsky’s characters—it is written in their souls, to the extent that they
experience themselves as being internally split. That is, the West has been
absorbed by the Russians psychologically and it cannot be excised. In his
Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky denies that it would be possible or even desir-
able to try to return to the way Russia was before the Westernizing reforms of
Peter the Great. He senses that, while for two centuries, the intelligentsia had
Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West ● 93
deserted Russia in their hearts, they are now returning; they have come back
after their European sojourn neither as Europeans nor merely Russians, but
as cosmopolitans comprehending both, and ready to further Russia’s world-
historical mission. He argues that “under no circumstances can we renounce
Europe. Europe is our second fatherland, and I am the first ardently to pro-
fess this; I have always professed this” (Dostoyevsky 1971b, 581).
Thus it seems not to be ideas themselves, Western or not, that are the issue
for Dostoyevsky. For he treats the problem of the evil actions committed by
those who are not evil themselves as being not only a Russian problem, but
one faced everywhere in a state of transition. He writes, “It has been so from
time immemorial, during transitional epochs, at times of violent commotion
in people’s lives—doubts, negations, skepticism and vacillation regarding the
fundamental social convictions” (149). And, even though the Russian soul
has been unmoored by the upheavals of the modern era, Dostoyevsky believes
that it contains within itself a limit, an ultimate humility and a kernel of
goodness that persists despite all the humiliations of history and degradations
of crime; the recovery of that kernel will be the basis of a true socialism and
the saving of the world. Those of his characters who attempt to act with infi-
nite freedom (most famously Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) discover
an inner limit. This is true of Nicholas Stavrogin, although he has been cor-
rupted himself and has corrupted his followers: he recognizes himself both
as being deracinated and as a soul seeking salvation. And it is true of his fol-
lowers, who find themselves very unwilling to commit murder. The excep-
tion seems to be Peter Verkhovensky, who is closest in the novel to being
truly devilish.
In conclusion, I have argued that there is an often-repeated traditionalist
narrative that tells how the loss of a higher frame of reference in modernity
leads to terror, how humanism leads to self-destruction. Some contemporary
commentators have found that Dostoyevsky convincingly demonstrates the
linkage between godless materialism of Westernized culture and terroristic
brutality, especially in The Possessed. This reading, given by some analysts of
September 11, needs to be questioned on a number of levels. My main con-
cern here has been to show that there has not been such an equivalence his-
torically between terrorism and nihilism as is commonly asserted, and that
although Dostoyevsky himself was a promulgator of this view to some extent,
he does not give us a simple teaching even in his avowedly tendentious novel,
The Possessed. The famous slogan “If God does not exist, nothing is forbid-
den” is not a sufficient summary of what he teaches in his fiction; it is often
forgotten that it is a statement made by one character in The Brothers
Karamazov and not necessarily in the voice of the author. And, although
94 ● Margaret Heller
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CHAPTER 5
Tuija Parvikko
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there
are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man
will always be left alive to tell the story.
—Arendt 1965, 232–33
F
or Hannah Arendt, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was a clear indica-
tion of a total collapse of the Western political tradition and its vocab-
ulary. From World War II onwards, she repeatedly reflected on the
question of how it was possible that even the analyses, made after the collapse
of the Third Reich, failed to reach the heart of the matter, that is to say, failed
to reach a political judgment on the mechanism of the birth and character of
totalitarian power.
Precisely as Arendt suggested, the problem at stake stems from the inca-
pacity of Western political thought to deal with and analyze politically
extreme events such as Nazi totalitarianism and the Holocaust. Our tradition
of political thought does not provide us with a valid and accurate vocabulary
with which it would be possible to seize the political aspect of these phenom-
ena (Arendt 1994, 302). Instead, the analysis shifts to their historical, psy-
chological, linguistic, philosophical, or juridical aspects (Agamben 1998, 7).
Genocide is an act of terror. After 9/11, we easily tend to forget that, as
such, it is not a new phenomenon. The case is rather that terror and terror-
ism often emerge unexpectedly in different contexts taking different modes
of expression. This is why each case has to be read politically separately in
98 ● Tuija Parvikko
order to understand its political meaning. In this chapter, the Nazi genocide
is understood to be one of the most important contexts of political terror and
terrorism in twentieth-century Europe. It is assumed that in order to under-
stand the political meaning of “new terrorism” of the contemporary world,
we need to understand the particular characteristics of earlier expressions of
political terror.
The lack of valid political vocabulary is most conspicuous when we try to
talk about the survivors of the Nazi genocide. The vocabulary at our disposal
is compelled to resort to the juridical tradition and its lexicon, talking about
“testimony,” “witnessing,” and “witnesses,” as if the stories of survivors were
merely testimonies given in the courtroom. Correspondingly, political judg-
ment of the genocide is reduced to an ethical reflection on the nature of evil
(on this huge literature see Felman and Laub 1992; Copjec 1996; Novick
1999; Bauer 2001; Todorov 2001). In this chapter, I claim that it is time to
return from the “other side of good and evil” (Nietzsche) to “this side of good
and evil” (Levi) to read politically Nazi totalitarianism, genocide, and the
interpretations presented of them. I claim that the analogy with old and new
terrorisms lies in the fact that terror and terrorism are always political phe-
nomena and should be read and interpreted as such. Political reading of ter-
rorisms means that the antiterrorist fight is not understood as a metaphysical
war between good and evil, but rather is understood as a political fight
between different political actors and their aims.
In this context, I suggest that the survivors might be understood as
Arendtian “truth-tellers” rather than juridical “witnesses.” In this way, it
might be possible to understand survivors and other debaters of Nazi totali-
tarianism as “politicians,” who try to interfere and affect both the present day
and the future by means of presenting interpretations and stories about past
events. It might be possible to understand that “eye-witnesses” do not have a
self-evident monopoly or primary position in the discussion and debate over
the question of what kind of conclusions we should draw about Nazi totali-
tarianism and the unique political history of the twentieth century at large.
Rather, a number of survivors may be understood as seekers of truth who are
fighting against falling silent, evading truth, and lying in a world in which
telling the truth has become a political action.
In order to show that this shift is necessary, I will contribute to the debate
about “witnessing the Holocaust” and “telling the story of the Holocaust” by
discussing and analyzing two interesting and important interpretations of it.
The first one is Hayden White’s thesis, according to which the Holocaust
should be understood in Barthesian terms as a modernist event and, as such,
its representation requires its own particular modes of expression. The second
To This Side of Good and Evil ● 99
possibility, that of a middle voice. Whereas in the active and passive voices,
the subject of the verb is presumed to be external to the action (either agent
or patient), in the middle voice, the subject is presumed to be interior to the
action. Consequently, in literary modernism, the verb “to write” connotes
neither an active nor a passive relationship but, rather, a middle one. In the
modern verb of middle voice “to write,” the subject is constituted as imme-
diately contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it
(White 1999, 38).
In White’s view, this difference indicates a new and distinctive way of
imagining, describing, and conceptualizing the relationships obtaining between
agents and acts, subjects and objects, a statement and its referent, the literal
and figurative levels of speech, and therefore the factual and fictional dis-
course. Consequently, he suggests that the kind of anomalies, enigmas, and
dead ends met with in the discussions of the representation of the Holocaust
are the result of a conception of discourse that owes too much to a realism
inadequate to represent events, such as the Holocaust, which are themselves
modernist in nature (White 1999, 38–39).
In White’s understanding, modernism appears as an anticipation of a new
form of historical reality, a reality that includes supposedly unimaginable,
unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects, such as the phenomena of Hitlerism,
the Final Solution, and total war. White argues that all this suggests that
modernist modes of representation may offer possibilities for representing the
reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of
realism could do. This demands that our notion of what constitutes realistic
representation must be revised to take account experiences that are unique to
our century and for which the older modes of representation have proven to
be inadequate (White 1999, 41–42).
If This Is a Man
Primo Levi’s (1919–87) first book, If This is a Man (first published in 1947),
is an account of his deportation and captivity at Monowitz-Buna that lasted
ten months until the arrival of the Russians, on January 27, 1945. The sev-
enteen chapters of the book deal with certain themes and aspects of the camp
life “in the order of urgency” (Levi 1979, 16; 1958). Breaking with the tradi-
tional use of chronology is one of the special characteristics of the text, which
suggests that it might be best understood as a case of intransitive writing. Levi’s
text differs from standard storytelling, at least in the following ways. Breaking
the chronology is intensified by playing with tempi and moods that is probably
possible only in Italian and very difficult, if not impossible, to translate into
To This Side of Good and Evil ● 101
other languages. In terms of this level of play, Levi is able to manipulate the
distance of the writing voice and the reading eyes from the text. At times,
both the writer and the reader are immersed among the inmates of the camp
and their surrealist life, while at other times, Levi intentionally draws himself,
together with the reader, further away from this “anti-world” and its absurdi-
ties in order to look at it from afar. Levi’s way of using the present tense has
been described “absolute” (Sossi 1998, 175) as far as it succeeds in blurring
the temporal (and perhaps also spatial) distance between the writer and the
reader. Levi uses also other ways of breaking with traditional storytelling,
such as departing from the normal structure of sentences, the extensive usage
of the passive voice or a generic “we” when referring to the camp inmates,
blurring both the author of the text and the agent of actions so that the events
seem to take place without any clear initiative or active impact of anybody or
any normal human logic of behavior whatsoever.
In addition, there is a specific aspect in the text that is related to the past
and the present, that is, to memory and history. This aspect challenges the
widely shared interpretation, according to which the collapse of the Third
Reich was followed by a period of “collective amnesia” during which people
did not want to think and remember what had taken place in Europe during
the twelve years of the Nazi empire (Wieviorka 1999; Traverso 2004). In the
chapter entitled Our Nights, Levi describes the collective dreams of the
inmates of the camp, challenging a “realistic” approach to remembering and
forgetting and suggesting that also in this respect the surrealism of the camp
succeeded in breaking the “normal” way of shaping the past, present, and
future, and the distinction between real and imaginary. Levi writes, “This is
my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They
are all listening to me. . . . It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to
be at home, among friendly people and to have 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” (1979, 66). This is, indeed, a dream and not a description of
a postwar situation at home. It caused embarrassment in Levi’s mind. He
continues, “I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to
Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his
dream and the dream of many others, perhaps everyone. Why does it hap-
pen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams,
in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story” (66).
In other texts (see Levi 1997), Levi has reported that the reluctance of the
family members and people in general to listen to stories of survivors was a
102 ● Tuija Parvikko
I must repeat—we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncom-
fortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the
memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not
only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their
prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch the bottom. Those who
did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have
returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete wit-
nesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are
the rule, we are the exception. (1988, 63–64)
Indeed, the complete, “integral” witnesses, those who went through all the
phases of destruction, did not come back to tell their story and experience.
Levi writes, “We who were favored by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to
recount not only our fate, but also that of the others, the submerged; but this
was a discourse on ‘behalf of third parties’, the story of things seen from close
by, not experienced personally. When the destruction was terminated, the
work accomplished was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to
recount his own death. . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy” (23).
There are two major points that Levi makes. On the one hand, he claims
that an average inmate of the camp is not necessarily the best possible witness
because, more often than not, it was impossible for him or her to shape the
entirety of the camp and the Nazi genocide. A huge number of victims did
not know where they were and what was going to happen to them. This gen-
eral ignorance transformed into a kind of illiteracy as to the entirety of the
phenomenon that was taking place. On the other hand, Levi points out that
those who would be capable of telling the entire experience of the process of
destruction are not able to do so because they are dead.
One of the most difficult aspects of understanding the phenomenon of
the camp has been the collapse of “normal” or conventional ethical and moral
patterns of behavior that took place there. It has been difficult to accept that
the inmates were not simply innocent victims of evil perpetrators. Levi points
out that the world into which one entered was not only terrible but also inde-
cipherable. It did not conform to any model of war, hostilities, or fighting,
To This Side of Good and Evil ● 105
because in the camp the enemy was not only surrounding the inmates but
also inside them: the “we” lost its limits. One could not discern any frontier
between friends and enemies, but instead, there were many confused frontiers
(1986, 25).
Levi argues that in order to understand how the camp really worked, we
should focus our attention on the analysis of a complex system of privileges
that the Nazis organized in the camps. Consequently, the Lager can be con-
sidered an excellent laboratory of privileges as far the hybrid class of prisoner-
functionaries constitutes its armature. It is the grey zone, with ill-defined
outlines that both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants
(1986, 27).
Levi divides the privileged into three categories. First, there are the low-
ranking functionaries that “formed a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle
washers, night-watchmen, bed smoothers . . . checkers of lice and scabies,
messengers, interpreters, assistants’ assistants” (1988, 29). Generally speak-
ing, they were poor devils like simple prisoners (1986, 31). Second, there
were those who occupied commanding positions, the Kapos. These were the
chiefs of the labor squads, the barracks chiefs, the clerks, the prisoners who
performed diverse duties in the camps’ administrative offices. Most of these
were persons who proved to be human specimens ranging from the mediocre
to the execrable (32–33).
It is the third group, the Sonderkommando, that has puzzled both the sur-
vivor-witnesses, like Levi, and other people the most. With the term
Sonderkommando, the SS referred to the group of prisoners who were
entrusted with running the crematoria. Levi argues that conceiving and orga-
nizing of these squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime because
it was precisely this institution that represented an attempt to shift on to oth-
ers, specifically on to the victims, the burden of guilt, so that they were
deprived even the solace of innocence (1986, 36).
death. Giorgio Agamben has come to a similar conclusion calling this aporia
Levi’s paradox.
For Agamben,3 the real problem lies in the gaps between the witness, tes-
timony, and receiver of the message. In his view, the testimony essentially
contains a hole that derives from the fact that survivors bear witness to some-
thing that cannot be witnessed. This something is the experience of death:
those who have seen the Gorgon lose their voice already before definitively
losing their physical vigor, being unable to tell what they have seen and expe-
rienced. An ideal “integral witness” can be postulated theoretically: he is the
“Muslim” who has seen the Gorgon. The problem is that the “Muslim” is not
able to bear witness, testify to what he or she has seen and experienced, but
the survivors have to do it in his or her stead. The consequence is an
unfulfilled hole between the witness and that of which he or she wants to
tell and testify.
Agamben’s thesis is problematic in the way it understands the relation
between Auschwitz and life and death, and consequently ends up mystifying
and mythologizing Auschwitz. It can be argued that the impossibility of look-
ing at the Gorgon is related not only to extermination camps but to funda-
mental conditions of human life in general: the boundary between life and
death can be crossed only once and nobody comes back to tell us about his or
her experience of death.
However, it has to be taken into account that Agamben’s idea can be fully
understood only in relation to his general thesis regarding the state of excep-
tion, within the frame of which the extermination camp is a place where the
borderline between life and death is blurred. In this environment, the
“Muslim” paradigmatically represents living dead figures (as the Nazis called
them) that have left the realm of life behind but have not yet fully died.
However, other inmates of the camp are destined to step outside the normal
realm of life, outside good and evil. The extermination camp is a nonplace,
where the inmates have ended up by the order of the sovereign who decides
on matters of life and death. It is a place in which no normal ethical values
and norms are in force or valid. Human and inhuman are blended with each
other and both prisoners and warders can act in a completely unpredictable
way. In Agamben’s interpretation, the blurring of all kinds of boundaries is
emphasized. By blurring boundaries between good and evil, and between life
and death, the extermination camp blurs also the boundary between that
which is human and inhuman. The “Muslim” is no longer a human being in
the proper sense of the word.
A careful reading of Agamben’s text quickly reveals that his interpretation
of Levi is based on two authorities, Arendt and Schmitt. A comparison with
To This Side of Good and Evil ● 107
Following Arendt, it may be argued that the significance of lying and telling
the truth has changed in the present-day world. While the traditional politi-
cal lie concerned true secrets or intentions, the modern political lie deals with
things that are not secrets at all but rather well-known to everybody (for an
extended treatment of this distinction, see O. Guaraldo in this volume). The
purpose of the traditional political lie was not to deceive everybody, but
rather, it was directed at and meant to deceive only the political enemy. It
made a hole in the fabric of factuality but did not destroy the entire fabric,
that is, reality. The modern political lie replaces reality with an image, which
its makers themselves begin to believe. The border between reality and fabri-
cated images begins to blur and finally hardly anyone even tries to tell the
truth (1968, 252–53).
Lying does not lead to the substitution of truth by something else; it leads,
rather, to living in a permanent lie and self-deception. It is in this situation
that the truth-teller steps on the scene. Arendt argues that to look upon pol-
itics from the perspective of truth means to take one’s stand outside the polit-
ical realm. This standpoint is the standpoint of the truth-teller.
110 ● Tuija Parvikko
changes our understanding of the world and our possibilities of judging that
which is taking place.
Although, in the present situation, it is easy to find signs of the Agambenian
state of exception becoming more and increasingly true every day, it is equally
easy to find support for the Arendtian optimism, according to which some-
body will always remain alive to tell the story. The attempt of the Nazis to
hide the traces of mass extermination never succeeded. It may be argued that
hardly any political crime or act of terror in the history of humankind has left
so many traces and stories, on the basis of which we can judge it.
In conclusion, the time of truth telling is not over. On the contrary, I
would like to suggest that seeking and telling the truth may become one of
the most important modes of political action in the twenty-first century. The
struggle for truth, memory, and history may put in motion something new
that may help us to weave a new web of reality—the common world between
people—in place of the present fabric of images.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
———. 1998. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. Torino: Bollati
Boringhieri.
Arendt, Hannah. 1953/1994. Mankind and terror. In Essays in understanding:
1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, 297–306. New York: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1951/1979. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace and
Jovanovich.
———. 1968. Truth and politics. In Between past and future: Eight exercises in politi-
cal thought, 227–64. New York: Viking.
———. 1963/1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York:
Viking.
Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Copjec, Joan, ed. 1996. Radical evil. London: Verso.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crisis of witnessing in literature,
psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge.
Lang, Berel. 1990. Act and idea in the Nazi genocide. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. Approaching limit events: Siting Agamben. In History in
transit: experience, identity, critical theory, 99–119. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1998. History and memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Levi, Primo. 1997. Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987. Torino: Einaudi.
———. 1988. The drowned and the saved. London: Michael Joseph.
———. 1986. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi.
———. 1979. If this is a man/The truce. London: Penguin.
112 ● Tuija Parvikko
Notes
1. Dominick LaCapra (1998, 20–21) distinguishes between primary and sec-
ondary memory. The former refers to immediate memories of events by the per-
son who has experienced them, while the latter refers to the critical working
through and adding to primary memory by information acquired later and else-
where.
2. In the jargon of the inmates of Auschwitz, “Muslims” (Muselmänner) referred
to exhausted and weak prisoners who had lost their strength and will to fight for
survival. They were doomed to death either by selection or general weakness.
3. In this section, I introduce and summarize the theses presented in Agamben
1998 and 2003, which is why I do not give specific page numbers.
CHAPTER 6
Kuisma Korhonen
A
t first sight, George Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) is a
hybrid book of fiction and nonfiction, where every odd-numbered
chapter is fiction, and every even-numbered one is autobiography.
However, on a closer look, it becomes evident that both stories are linked
to a real historical event: to the disappearance of the author’s mother in
Auschwitz.
The book may serve, then, as a kind of test case in order to analyze the
difference between two different genres, autobiography and fiction, and
between the two different modes of truth that they evoke. Autobiography, as
a testimony to one’s own life, is usually read against the expectations of hon-
esty and truthfulness, the author being the ultimate witness of its topic.
Fiction, on the other hand, is read as being independent from truth-value in
the sense of correspondence between signs and referents: fiction may use real
or invented events (for example, autobiographical events), but the real signif-
icance of the story—its “truthfulness” in a larger sense—is not dependent on
any direct relationship between the narrated events and real life, but rather on
the possibilities it offers to the reader to identify with or take distance from
some perspectives in the text. As I will argue in this paper, the relationship
between the two modes might be much more complicated than we usually
think: fiction may very well give us, the readers, access to a deeper level of
reality than nonfiction.
114 ● Kuisma Korhonen
Where fiction utilizes, not exclusively but largely, the process of identification,
the genre of testimony both in its texts and—this is a crucial step—in the basis
for interpreting and reading those texts rejects identification. . . . The differ-
ence between testimony and fiction is at this very basic level. The attempt by
testimony texts to refuse the very strong and often taken-for-granted power of
identification is a key ‘nuts and bolts’ part of the ‘strangeness’ of testimony that
Felman and Laub highlight. The genre prohibits readings that identify and so
consume the testimonies and this generic prohibition is how, following Levi, a
‘dyke’ is erected against this, even though it is often broken. (2004, 38–39)
focalization that draw the reader inside the text, so that he or she can identify,
at least temporarily and playfully, with some position or perspective in the
text and thus evaluate how convincing that position or perspective is.
In historiography, unlike in fiction, the reference is outside the text and
the reader, in the world of textual documents like archives, testimonies, and
other historical studies that help us to construct a narrative about singular
events that have taken place in verifiable time and place. Therefore, in histo-
riography there is, in principle, no need to use focalization or other narrative
devices encouraging reader identification: the reader evaluates the truth-value
of the text from its relation to its outside. In textual practice, however, the dif-
ference between fiction and history is often far from absolute—as Hayden
White has argued (1978, 1987), historical studies often do use similar rhetor-
ical strategies as fiction: they are not just objective reports about “what really
happened,” but attempts to persuade the reader about the validity of a certain
perspective and interpretation of the events.
Moreover, can we really apply the distinction between fictional and his-
torical narratives to testimonies, even in principle? As Jacques Derrida has
noted, is not the very point of witnessing exactly that the witness can refer
only to his or her own experience, his or her own memories—in other words,
to something that is no longer present, neither to the audience nor to the wit-
ness him- or herself (2005, 31–32)? Or, as Paul Celan put it, “No one/bears
witness for the/witness” (1971, 240).1 Testimony defines itself as being the
opposite to fiction, but simultaneously, it must include the possibility of a lie,
or fiction, in itself in order to be testimony: if there is some definitive proof
that excludes this possibility, there is no longer need for testimony (Derrida
1996, 23). In cases where we really need a witness—when there are no other
records available of the event, when the witness is the only source we have—
we cannot take an objective stand. Testimony relies on an act of faith: we
must choose whether we believe the witness or not. We cannot stay outside
the testimony and compare its argument to some sources outside itself;
instead, we must try to adopt the perspective of the speaker, at least tem-
porarily, and see if this perspective is, in itself, persuasive enough.
But it is here that the real problem lies: can we step inside a Holocaust tes-
timony? We can here refer to Dori Laub’s provocative statement that “there
was . . . historically no witness to the Holocaust, either from outside or from
inside the event”—a statement that refers to the brutal destruction of human
value and therefore also to the destruction of the possibility for genuine
human relations. Laub writes, “There was no longer an other to which one
could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject,
of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a
reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the
116 ● Kuisma Korhonen
possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another. But when one cannot turn
to a ‘you’ one cannot say ‘thou’ even to oneself. The Holocaust created in this
way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself ” (1992, 82).
The resistance to identification in the case of testimony is thus essentially
different from the virtual lack of identification in historiography. The only
appeal that a testimony has is a plea: please, come here, listen, share this expe-
rience with me, believe me! However, it is this possibility of addressing the
reader, the possibility of sharing, even the very possibility of witnessing itself
that is called into question by the experience of the Holocaust. The reader
cannot identify with the survivor because the survivor cannot identify with
him- or herself and no longer has any positive identity that one could iden-
tify with. There is no stable standpoint, no narrative continuity that could
make sense as the “narrative identity,” the Ricoeurian ipse.
It seems to be, indeed, the case that many Holocaust testimonies do resist
the kind of easy and pleasurable identification that takes place, for example,
in reading romantic novels. There is, as Shoshona Felman has put it, genuine
strangeness in many Holocaust testimonies that disturb our reading practices
(Felman 1992, 7). Eaglestone lists some typical textual features that many
Holocaust testimonies share and that seem to interrupt the processes of easy
and automatic identification. These include, for example, temporal and logi-
cal gaps, shifts, and breaks in narrative; different metanarrative frames that
remind the reader of the reality of the testimonial act; the sheer unbearability
of narrated events; allegories of failed understanding that underline the
impossibility of comprehending the event; lack of narrative closure; and
sometimes overidentification that Eaglestone takes, paradoxically, as proving
the ultimate impossibility of positive identification. These features are most
visible in some modernist texts like in Paul Celan’s poetry, but according to
Eaglestone, one can discern them also in many seemingly realistic testimonies
of the Holocaust (2004, 42–71).
Not only is it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for us to imagine the
extreme experiences of terror that Holocaust victims and survivors went
through, many Holocaust witnesses in fact state overtly that we should not
even try to appropriate their experiences and imagine them as resembling
something even remotely familiar to us. Some commentators like George
Steiner or Berel Lang (1990) have even felt that all attempts to represent
the horrors of Holocaust victims are inevitably doomed to fail. The horror
was too extreme, too vast to be represented in any meaningful way—and,
so the argument goes, thus all Holocaust fictions that display the events as
redemptive stories of protagonists that we can easily identify with (like,
Narrating the Trauma ● 117
according to many critics, Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List does) are
ethically dubious.
Violence of Identification
According to the Levinasian ethics that is the starting point for Eaglestone,
identification betrays a “metaphysics of comprehension” that can be under-
stood “as both the desire for and the methods by and through which Western
thought, in many different ways, comprehends, seizes, or consumes what is
other to it and so reduces the other to itself, to the same” (2004, 4). By iden-
tification, we refuse to welcome the other as truly other; instead, we incorpo-
rate the other into a modality of the same, into something familiar and
subordinate to our will.2
There is always an element of violent mastery and possession in identifi-
cation. As Diana Fuss states, “Identification operates on one level as an end-
less process of violent negation, a process of killing off the other in fantasy in
order to usurp the other’s place, the place where the subject desires to be”
(1995, 9).
The popularity of Holocaust literature and movies may tell us not only
about our need to understand and learn from the historical events, but also
about our secret and not-so-innocent desire to identify with the victims and
thus appropriate the uncanny event as something that we can control and
even enjoy in our fantasies. In some extreme cases, identification with victims
has produced the phenomenon of false testimonies, like Benjamin
Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996), the fraud testimony of a Holocaust child-
hood in the camps. In this particular case, it is difficult to tell whether
Wilkomirski’s book is a result of its author’s pathological identification or a
carefully calculated attempt to manipulate the readers’ pathological identifica-
tion with the victims.
The impossibility for others to understand becomes clear also in Imre
Kertesz’s Fatelessness (2004), although from a different point of view: when
the young survivor returns to Budapest from Buchenwald, many people
pity him for the hell he must have gone through, but are not able to
believe—just as we, the readers, are probably not able to believe, either—
that the young boy actually took life in the camps as more or less banal,
everyday routine, or even experienced moments of happiness in Auschwitz,
as the narrator provocatively claims. Here we can see, once again, that the
metaphysics of comprehension is working even when we try actively to avoid
it: by stressing the “incomprehensibility” of the horrors of the camps, we have
turned the Holocaust into a sublime nonplace, and we feel disturbed when
118 ● Kuisma Korhonen
some testimony does not fit into that description. To call the Holocaust
“unique” or “nonrepresentable” may also be a technique of comprehension
and appropriation.
Given all the ethical questions that identification may raise, we must still
ask if it is possible to do without it. Why would the witness give his or her tes-
timony without any possibility for us to share it? How could we imagine the
pain and fear of victims if we are not allowed, in our imagination, to replay
some scene where we identify with the victims, and imagine “what it would
have been like, if it had happened to me”? This act of imagination may be
flawed, it may raise ethical problems, but one can always argue that without
it we could not form any relation to otherness at all. And it seems impossible
to define fiction as writing that is “using identification” and testimony as
something that is simply “rejecting it,” as Eaglestone claims in the beginning
of his book.
In fact, as Eaglestone later makes clear, the “dyke” against identification in
Holocaust testimonies is, indeed, often broken—one may even claim that all
narratives necessarily create some kind of identification between the reader
and the characters of the story. Testimonies do, in fact, share many textual
strategies with fiction as, for example, Hayden White (2006) shows in his
analysis of the use of figural language in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. In
Anthelme and Kertesz, too, to take only a couple of canonical examples, we
can discern many narrative techniques that arguably encourage identifica-
tion. It is noteworthy, for example, that the focalizer in Kertesz’s Fatelessness is
rather the young boy who is experiencing the events, and not the narrator, the
one who survived the events and is writing from his retrospective position.3
This narrative technique—to limit the knowledge to that of the young self
who did not yet know what to expect, who did not yet know that the trains
did not lead him to a nice clean summer camp as he was told—not only adds
gruesome irony to the narrative, but arguably invites the reader to identify
with the young protagonist. On the other hand, however, character focaliza-
tion may also be read as a technique that adds a level of fictionality to the text:
the artificiality of the narrator’s solution to withdraw crucial information
soon leads to the reader’s awareness of the rhetorical construction of the text,
and thus resists identification.
In fact, when Eaglestone actually begins to read Holocaust testimonies, he
states that these testimonies create a double movement of identification and
resistance to it. He writes, “The texts lead to identification and away from it
simultaneously. This stress between centrifugal and centripetal forces is
played out, but not resolved, in the texts of testimonies and it is this that
characterizes the genre of testimony” (2004, 43).
Narrating the Trauma ● 119
A Holocaust Orphan
The tension between “centrifugal and centripetal forces,” between identifi-
cation and resistance to identification, becomes especially crucial, claims
Eaglestone, when we deal with the testimonies of the survivors’ children
(2004, 73). Transference and identification are necessary in all parent-child
relations, so the tales of survivors’ children—such as Art Spiegelmann’s
Mauss, for example—must deal simultaneously with the natural need of all
children to identify in some period of their life with their parents, and the
very impossibility to identify with the experiences of Holocaust victims.
Moreover, this aporia is the key not only to the problems of second genera-
tion survivors, but also to all of us who are born after the Holocaust and try
to imagine how it was.
We may claim that the tension between the need and the impossibility of
identification becomes even more urgent when we deal with the accounts of
Holocaust orphans. Survivors’ children have something to work with—the
narratives of their parents—but in the case of Holocaust orphans, there is no
narrative to begin with. As a result, the whole process where the child con-
structs his or her own identity becomes disturbed: how can one identify with
an absence?
Georges Perec was a Holocaust orphan. He was born to an immigrant
Polish-Jewish family in France, but during World War II, his father died at
the front, and his mother was deported to Auschwitz and disappeared. After
he had lost his parents, Georges Perec was brought up by different relatives:
aunts and grandparents. Later he became one of the most celebrated of
French avant-garde authors, whose impact on what we nowadays call “post-
modern” literature has been crucial. He participated in the work of the avant-
garde group OuLiPo, Ouvrier de la Littérature Potentielle, and published
many novels, including, for example, Disapparition, a novel that was written
without using the letter e, and a rich chronicle of lives in an apartment build-
ing in Paris, La Vie mode d’emploi. In fact, already the playful and self-con-
scious nature of his literary works may raise some suspicions concerning the
nature of his “autobiography”: the reader may also ask if Perec, in his autobi-
ographical text, is too much a fabulist to be taken as a reliable witness. As we
will see, this suspicion is not totally ungrounded—although I will claim, at
the same time, that it is exactly Perec’s skills as a fabulist that makes his testi-
mony so truthful and valuable.
Parts of W ou le souvenir d’enfance were first published as a feuilleton in a
literary journal, then as a whole in 1974. It contains two texts that alternate
with each other. The odd chapters, printed in italics, belong to the story of
an island in Patagonia called W, a kind of totalitarian state that is totally
120 ● Kuisma Korhonen
dedicated to athletics. As Perec tells us, this story “reconstructs” a fantasy that
he developed at the age of thirteen. The even chapters, printed in bold font,
belong to an autobiographical narrative where Perec recalls some memories of
his own childhood—or rather flashbacks that in some cases seem to be actual
memories, in other cases perhaps constructed memories or fantasies. It is also
noteworthy that in the middle of the book, where chronologically there
should be an autobiographical chapter telling about the most decisive event
of his childhood, his mother’s death in Auschwitz, there is only an empty
page with three ellipses points in parentheses.
The more one reads the fictional story of W, the clearer it becomes that
life in the dystopian world of athletes increasingly starts to resemble the topic
that has been suppressed in the autobiographical tale: living conditions in the
Nazi concentration camps. It is not a miracle, then, that Perec’s book has
been recently read in the light of trauma theory, for example, by Lawrence D.
Kritzman (2005). As Kritzman says, “W thus interfaces with the unnamed
pain of childhood memories and this suggests that what resists narration
might be recuperated through the spectatorship of a fictional world” (2005,
192). The thing that was too horrible to be told in autobiography—a
mother’s death in Holocaust—wrote its way into fantasy.
The Fantasy of W
In the beginning of the fictional story of W (with chapters printed in italics),
a person whose real name we are not told, but who has adopted a false iden-
tity under the name of Gaspard Winkler, relates the story of how he was
encouraged to go to Patagonia in search of a small child whose name and
passport he has received. The child, the real Gaspard Winkler, as the repre-
sentative of Bureau veritas, Otto Apfelstahl explains to the narrator, had
become a deaf-mute, probably because of some unhealed childhood trauma.
His mother took the child on a trip in order to heal him, but they were ship-
wrecked in Patagonia, where the mother died in a horrible way, and the boy
disappeared. Here we can already note some traces that hint at Perec’s own
autobiography: a child who is unable to speak or hear because of a deep
trauma, and the death of the mother, this time described (unlike in the auto-
biographical text) almost in graphic detail. We may here also mention, as the
narrator of the autobiographical tale reveals, that the name Gaspard Winkler
appeared in the first finished (but never published) novel of Perec, La
Condottiere, where it belonged to a forgerer of art works, thus hinting that
there might also be a forgery lurking in the story of W. After W ou le souvenir
Narrating the Trauma ● 121
An Autobiography
In the first chapter of the autobiographical story, Perec tells us that the story
of W is, in fact, a reconstruction of a story that he himself invented, narrated
and illustrated at the age of thirteen. The story as he then created it disap-
peared and was forgotten, until one evening in 1967, when he recollected it,
or at least its topic: it was a story about a society of athletes in Patagonia, and
it was “if not the story, at least a story of my childhood.” Later, Perec found
some drawings from that period—four of them have actually been recognized
from his papers. He then reconstructed the story of W and published it as a
feuilleton in a literary magazine, Quinzaine littéraire, in 1969 to 1970. It then
took four years for Perec to complete the other, autobiographical text of the
book, and publish them both in the final form, side by side, in 1974. All of
this is related by the narrator of the autobiographic story—but as we will see,
this is not the whole truth of the birth process of the book.
The narrator of the autobiographical story—let’s call him Perec—begins
by confirming provocatively, “I have no childhood memories.” Perec adds,
however, that this is really a kind of excuse: another history, the History with
a capital “hache” (letter H and “axe” in French—referring also to History as
Holocaust), had already given the response (the war, the camps), so he could
always refuse to answer any questions about his childhood. After that
provocative beginning, the narrator begins to recall and interpret those mem-
ories and flashbacks he does have. The death of his mother in the camps is
mentioned in the seventh chapter, but in a cold, matter-of-fact style without
any details or emotional impact. Most of the memories are, however, very
uncertain, fragmented, and sometimes he tells several versions of the same
memories. He adds notes to them, where he checks the facts and finds out
that many of them were probably later constructions, influenced by works of
fiction or accidents that had happened to other people. In other words, mem-
ory is treated not as a mere warehouse of direct traces from the past—instead,
it is seen as an active process in which we are constantly constructing our
identity. The care that Perec gives to recording not only those memories that
are probably genuine, but also those that are probably constructed after-
wards, reveals that the true significance of his childhood memories is not
really in their validity as reliable documents, but in the way the mind con-
structs “a past,” starting from small fragments, flashbacks, and micronarra-
tives. Especially revealing are many constructed memories, where Perec
remembers himself as having suffered some accident, but finds out that the
event cannot be confirmed. Under their factual falsity, those constructed
memories carry another, more significant truth: the experience of the child as
a carrier of an unhealed wound, a trauma.
Narrating the Trauma ● 123
dream, the father saw his son in flames, and heard the son saying, “Father,
don’t you see, I am burning.” The father woke up, and saw, indeed, that in
the next room the candle had fallen and had lit the corpse of his son on fire.
Freud interpreted that the dream fulfilled the father’s wish to see his son
awake once again, even to the point where the dream urged him to continue
sleeping while his son was indeed in flames (1981, 509–10). However, as
Lacan later pointed out, the call to wake up also took place in the dream—
the dream both fulfilled the wish of the consciousness not to awake, and the
imperative to wake up (1973, 57–58).
Perhaps fantasies and fiction function sometimes, too, as a way in which
consciousness protects itself from waking to reality. However, fiction may
also include an imperative to wake up, to leave the fiction—an imperative
that paradoxically can only be heard in fiction. We may thus think that the
young Georges tried to escape the hard reality into fantasy, but the small
pieces of information that he had received from his mother’s fate in
Auschwitz wrote themselves into fantasy.
from Freudian theory in the first place. We can even imagine that the case of
the adolescent Georges was discussed in the meetings of école Freudienne in
Paris that Dolto had founded with Jacques Lacan—and was thus affecting the
development of Freudian trauma theory in France.
It is certain that young Georges suffered from the loss of his parents. But
can we read it directly from his adolescent fantasies? I must admit that it is
hard to trace any traumatic content from the only original drawing that I
have seen, printed in the biography of Bellos—in the picture there seems to
be just normal athletes, not very well drawn, but not starving or humiliated
in any way.
Perhaps Dolto’s analysis was correct. Or perhaps it was produced by an
overactive Freudian imagination. We cannot say—but what we can say is that
at the time, when Perec started to “reconstruct” the story of W, he was not an
innocent witness of his childhood trauma but a highly self-conscious author
who used his wide knowledge on psychoanalysis—from therapies with Dolto
and two other analysts over the years, and from Freudian literature that he
had read—in constructing two texts and their juxtaposition. Perhaps the
name of Gaspard Winkler as the alter ego of the author is a hint that the book
itself is a kind of forgery. Or, if not a forgery, then a puzzle, or an extremely
complicated play of hide-and-seek, as we are told in the autobiographical
text. Perec writes, “Une fois de plus, les pièges de l’ecriture se mirent en place.
Une fois de plus, je fus comme un enfant qui joue à cache-cache et qui ne sait
pas ce qu’il craint ou desire plus: rester caché, être découvert” (1975, 14).
What first seems to be a fairly reliable distinction between fiction and
nonfiction becomes challenged in the book. The reader is, indeed, able to
readily recognize fiction from autobiography merely from their style, thus
partly affirming Dorrit Cohn’s (1999) theory on the “sign-posts of fiction.”
However, the manifold connections between the two, the manifold “fabula-
tions” in autobiographical text and the status of the fictional story as reveal-
ing the most essential repressed memory, suggest that we should read the
book as a whole as belonging to some third genre, beyond the distinction fic-
tion/nonfiction.
We may here return to the question of textual encounter: what kind of
positions for identification or distance does Perec’s book offer to the reader?
Or, to be more precise, what positions do (a) the story of W, (b) the autobio-
graphical text, and (c) their combination as two juxtaposed texts produce?
First of all, it is clear that Perec’s book does make a direct identification
difficult, just as Eaglestone says that Holocaust testimonies do. Should we
identify with the “false” Gaspard Winkler, someone who lives under a false
identity and carries the name of a deaf-mute child (or, if we want to follow
126 ● Kuisma Korhonen
than to the parallels and resonances between the text and the reader’s own
experientiality of trauma and memory in general.
In the reading process, what is important is not so much the trauma of its
author, but the traumas of all its possible readers. We do not have to know
what details of the author’s biography are correct and what details are not,
because the true significance of the text lies elsewhere, namely, in the way in
which we all narrate our lives, both by constructing more or less autobio-
graphical story from our memories and other pieces of information, and cre-
ating fictional stories in our dreams and fantasies. And the ultimate challenge
for us is to learn to relate both kind of stories—and the truth that they both
evoke—to each other.
References
Bellos, David. 1993. Georges Perec. A life in words. London: Harvill.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Celan, Paul. 1967. Atemwende. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1971. Speech-grille and selected poems. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New
York: Dutton.
Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. The distinction of fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Demeure: Fiction et temoignage. In Passions de la littérature.
Avec Jacques Derrida, ed. Michel Lisse, 13–73. Paris: Galilée.
———. 2005. Poétique et politique du témoignage. Paris: L’Herne.
Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the postmodern. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Felman, Shoshona. 1992. Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching. In
Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshona
Felman and Dori Laub, 1–57. New York: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1981/1900. Interpretation of dreams. In The standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4 & 5. Trans. James Strachey.
London: Hogarth.
Fuss, Diana. 1995. Identification papers. New York: Routledge.
Kertesz, Imre. 2004. Fatelessness. Trans. Tim Wilkinson. New York: Vintage.
Lacan, Jacques. 1973. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Kritzman, Lawrence D. 2005. Remembrance of things past: Trauma and mourning in
Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Journal of European Studies 35 (2): 187–200.
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Laub, Dori. 1992. An event without witness. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in lit-
erature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92.
New York: Routledge.
Lejeune, Philippe. 1991. La mémoire et l’oblique. Georges Perec autobiographe. Paris: P.
O. L.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perec, Georges. 1975. W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Paris: Denoël.
Phelan, James. 2005. Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Pihlainen, Kalle. 2006. The confines of the form: Historical writing and the desire
that it be what it is not. In Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the history/litera-
ture debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen, 55–67. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Riffaterre, Michael. 1990. Fictional truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of discourse: Essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
———. 1987. The content of the form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2006. Historical Discourse and Literary Writing. In Tropes for the past:
Hayden White and the history/literature debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Wilkomirski, Benjamin. 1996. Fragments. Trans. Carol Janeway. London: Picador.
Notes
1. In the original German: “Niemand/zeugt für den/Zeugen,” in the poem
“Aschenglorie,” in Celan 1967, 68.
2. See also Dominick LaCapra, who states, “By identification I mean the unmedi-
ated fusion of self and other in which the otherness or alterity of the other is not
recognized and respected” (2001, 27n31).
3. For focalization in retrospective, first-person narration, see Phelan 2005.
CHAPTER 7
Matti Hyvärinen
T
error is an everyday occurrence in every country, township, and fac-
tory, where animal farming is practiced. The everyday life of farmed
animals is nothing less than what happened during the Holocaust.
These are but a few of the poignant claims made by the novelist Elizabeth
Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2004).
Coetzee himself might easily be recognized as a paradigmatically political
author in such texts ranging from Waiting for the Barbarians to Disgrace and
Elizabeth Costello. Perhaps in part because his books have so often been read
as straightforward political comments, and as his political comments, he
seems to distance himself from all these quick conclusions by way of this
complex, self-ironic novel. As a result, Elizabeth Costello is not only about ter-
ror, it is also about circulating and distributing terror and trauma through
language and speech. The aim of this chapter is not to reveal Coetzee’s polit-
ical opinions with regard to animals; rather, it aims at understanding how lit-
erary fiction can pose the issues of trauma and terror in new contextual ways.
Coetzee-the-author offers a series of explicit and less explicit reading guide-
lines, and these guidelines are profoundly helpful for everyone who endeav-
ors to read self-conscious fiction, or arts in general, politically.
Elizabeth Costello is quite openly a novel of ideas. To enforce this model,
and certainly not without irony, Coetzee has subtitled his book, Eight Lessons.
To start with, we do not have titled or numbered “chapters” or any other way
to chart the natural flow of events to identify with, just eight separate but
130 ● Matti Hyvärinen
Traveling Focalization
Literary theorists have used a number of terms, such as center of conscious-
ness, perspective, and focalization to describe the point of view from which
events are seen, sensed or observed. Gerard Genette (1980, 185–98) pointed
Too Much Terror? ● 131
out that the earlier visual terms “perspective” and “point of view” problemat-
ically merged the positions of the one who observes and the one who speaks.
In response, he suggested a clear distinction between focalizor (observer) and
narrator (speaker) (see also Rimmon-Kenan 1991; Herman 2002). As Mieke
Bal (1997, 143–44) notes, there is one additional merit in the terminology of
focalizing: the word is more flexible in terms of inflection. Therefore, we can
have terms for the process (focalizing), the subject (focalizor), and the object
of observation (focalized).
Some focalizors are internal or character-bound, meaning that we see and
experience everything through the senses of one or more characters; in other
cases, the focalizors are not characters of the story, and are thus called exter-
nal. It is noteworthy that focalization and narration do not necessarily over-
lap. A third-person narration may as well reveal the characters’ most intimate
thoughts and feelings. For example, Ian McEwan’s (2005) Saturday uses such
a technique in accounting for one day in the life of the neurosurgeon Henry
Perowne. A strictly internal, character-bound focalizor is naturally tied to the
perceptions of that particular character, and cannot reveal other persons’
innermost thoughts. In representing fictional consciousnesses, however, the
distinction between focalized and focalizor cannot be absolute, as Alan
Palmer (2004, 49) has noted. While Henry Perowne is Saturday’s focalizor,
he, of course, is also focalized, that is, observed by himself. Finally, works of
fiction vary remarkably as regarding how fixed or swiftly moving the focaliza-
tion is presented.
Without a doubt, focalization is an ideologically powerful tool. “If the
focalizor coincides with the character,” Mieke Bal (1997, 146) maintains,
“that character will have an advantage over the other characters. The reader
watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle, be inclined to accept
the vision presented by that character.” John Updike’s (2006) Terrorist realizes
its strong critical edge due much to the fact that the young Islamist Ahmad is
its key focalizor.
Elizabeth Costello’s lessons vary importantly in terms of focalization. As a
rule, the speaker is not the focalizor, yet the focalizor is not just a curious or
neutral member of the audience. When Elizabeth Costello gives her talks,
either on realism or on the lives of animals, the focalizor is either external or
it is her son John. We view both the black African author and Elizabeth’s sis-
ter, Blanche, through the lenses of Elizabeth’s critical consciousness. These
solutions build distance between speakers and the reader, and help to resist
any easy identification.
Even before Costello’s first talk on realism, a good dose of skepticism is
provided by her son, who ponders, “Her thoughts would be, he suspects, as
132 ● Matti Hyvärinen
of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths” (63). Instead, she
takes a detour through the Holocaust:
Between 1942 and 1945 several million people were put to death in the con-
centration camps of the Third Reich: at Treblinka alone more than a million
and half. The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles,
for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp;
said that, while in general they might have guessed what was going on, they did
not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in
another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.
(63–64)
The listeners, who do not properly know or are not interested in what hap-
pens to animals in their neighborhoods, are put on an equal footing with
people who lived next to Treblinka. The comparison between the Holocaust
and the treatment of animals fills the rhetorical void created by skipping
the details.
After a while, Costello discovers an entirely new dimension of her key
comparison. She says, “They [Holocaust victims] went like sheep to the
slaughter. . . . They died like animals. . . . The Nazi butchers killed them. . . .
Denunciation of the camps reverberates fully with the language of the stock-
yard and slaughterhouse that is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground
for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says
the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals” (64–65).
At this point, Costello’s argument is perhaps at its most powerful. The talk
draws our attention to the curious fact that the unusually cruel and obscene
treatment of human beings is regularly represented by a discourse on animals.
The animal is, in this language, the absolute other, the natural site of cruelty
and instrumentality. The uncanniness of the quote may be tested by trying to
replace “animal” by any politically incorrect expression of segregation or sub-
jugation. The quote would be either implausible or so gravely prejudiced that
it would be counterproductive. But using animals in those sentences is still
dreadfully natural. It is almost as if the power of language would betray
exactly those people who resist oppression, racism, and cruelty, and as if the
capacity to express extremities would dissolve in case the decent treatment of
animals would be the intuitive presupposition. That is, in case they would
not be treated “animally” but “humanly.”
Costello proceeds next to discuss intelligence tests conducted on chim-
panzees. She foregrounds the cruelty attached to the imprisonment and solitary
confinement, but seems simultaneously to take an odd step toward humanizing
the animals. She suddenly turns to fiercely criticizing the philosopher Thomas
134 ● Matti Hyvärinen
Nagel. Nagel had posed the question concerning what it is like to be a bat.
According to Nagel, we can only know how a bat behaves. She quotes Nagel,
“Merely to imagine what it is like to live as a bat does, says Mr Nagel—to
imagine spending our nights flying around catching insects in our mouths,
navigating by sound instead of sight, and our days hanging upside down—
is not good enough, because all that tells us is what it is like to behave like
a bat” (76).
Nagel’s thought might enable the recognition of the radical difference
between us and bats or other animals, to help us delimit the colonizing
impulse of human consciousness. Instead, Costello chooses to attack the idea
passionately. Her key reply is that she is able to imagine herself as dead. If she
can do that, why could she not imagine herself as a bat? “To be a living bat is
to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to
be full of being,” she retorts (77). From this observation, she returns to the
Nazis and their incapacity to imagine themselves in the cattle cars, that is, as
Jews. This coldness indicates the lack of any capacity for empathy. By this
means, Elizabeth Costello is ready to conclude, “If I can think my way into
the existence of a being who has never existed [referring here to her fictional
figures], then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee
or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life” (80).
Can I, then, competently imagine being a Muslim woman, Islamist
fighter, or an Australian aboriginal? Are imagination and “fullness of being”
universal keys to another being’s experience? Costello is obviously mixing a
few things here. One can indeed imagine a mental world where houses and
trees act and suffer, but it is not necessarily the same thing as understanding
houses. It is extremely difficult to imagine oneself without the level of
assumed key mental capacities—and their deficiencies—of observation, feel-
ing, reflection, and language that are a characteristic feature of humans;
therefore such imagination necessarily inappropriately transfers human rea-
soning and mentalities to fictional animals. It is enough to remember the
conceptual difficulties of writing history without anachronistic exports from
contemporary thought.
Empathy, as important as it is in terms of ethics and politics, does not
offer much in the way of understanding bats. And why stop with bats and
oysters? Can we not work our imagination into that of a birch tree? Even
though I fully know that cars do not actually think and feel, there is nothing
to stop one from feeling empathy with his or her old car, and to imagine its
sufferings, wishes, or cravings for the fresh spring air.
The imagining of bats was vital to Costello for a particular reason. The
most horrendous feature in death camps was not that humans treated other
Too Much Terror? ● 135
humans like lice, because that would be “too abstract,” as she reckons. The
worst thing was that the perpetrators failed to think themselves in the position
of their victims (79); the divide between “we” and “them” was too absolute.
Costello is right; to imagine the horrors of victims would have made the
crimes much harder to execute. Still we are on a slippery ground because
many theories and testimonies of the Holocaust resist the very idea of “under-
standing” the experience of concentration camps (see, for example, T. Parvikko
in this volume).
In a problematic way, we seem to come back to the human, cognitive
capacity to narrativize almost anything. To narrativize the life of animals
from the human perspective by way of an uncontrolled imagination could
well be criticized as a new form of colonization. Costello’s discussion on the
intelligence tests of chimpanzees fails precisely here. She introduces the test
animals and their dilemmas as if they were human-like thinkers, without
proper notice of the particular mental qualities of the species. In this imagi-
nation, the bats do not have independent worlds constitutive of their own
priorities, nor their own cognitive ways of world-making. Here I suggest
Yann Martel’s (2002) The Life of Pi as an alternative and intriguing attempt
to understand and honor the otherness of animals qua animals.
of existence and of natural history. The farmed animals are not hunted from
amongst a free and wild life, stigmatized, and then closed into overpopulated
and purposely cruel camps. Indeed, cruelty is hardly the conscious purpose of
animal farming, and as a counterpart, there is no such thing in nature as a
kind and stress-free way of dying at an old, dignified age. The conditions of
animal farming are thus, at least potentially, a matter of negotiation and pos-
sible reform, whereas the suffering of the Holocaust victims was exactly the
point and thus absolutely beyond reform and mitigation.
Of course, it is debatable as to how much such differences matter, and
what ethical consequences they may hold. What I find worth resisting, even
repulsive, however, is the transformation of the Holocaust experience to that
of a free-for-all rhetorical tool to boost other political and ideological issues
whatsoever, even apparently good ones. If we accept that we truly can drop
key historical characteristics of the Holocaust, in the name of abstract “evil-
ness,” and turn the figure into a generalized source of outrage, we are on the
slippery slope toward normalizing the experience itself. Following Costello,
the Holocaust is always already deeply rooted in every town. She seems to
declare a sort of “animal universalism,” and strong emotional continuity from
human beings to that of bats and oysters. This is a sound argument against
the binary opposition between humans and animals, and yet, by the same
token, it erases the significance of all differences. Shall we now renounce all
distinctions and consider eating our neighbors on equal terms with the eating
of oysters?
Against this universalistic line of reasoning arises a theme of particular rel-
evance for those who are closest to us. Norma, Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law,
grows more and more hostile toward Costello’s line of argumentation. In
addition to her more academic comments, there is one particularly important
remark made to her husband, the night before Elizabeth’s departure. Norma
bursts out, “I would have more respect for her if she didn’t try to undermine
me behind my back, with her stories to the children about the poor little veal
calves and what the bad men do to them. I’m tired of having them pick at
their food and ask, ‘Mom, is this veal?’ when it’s chicken or tuna fish. It’s
nothing but a power game” (113–14).
Costello, in turn, is herself agonized by the contradiction between her
absolute principles and nonresponse on the part of people she encounters.
On the trip to the airport, Elizabeth talks to her son. She tells him, “It’s that
I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easy among
people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask
myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying propor-
tions? . . . It’s as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark
Too Much Terror? ● 137
about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it’s nice, isn’t
it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young
Polish-Jewish virgins’” (114–15).
We may read these lectures as desperate ethical-cum-political argumenta-
tion. Some readers may find them repulsively self-righteous. The irritation
and tension between these interpretations offers the first instance of “too
much terror.” In these two lessons, Elizabeth Costello is on her moral mission
and does not hesitate to throw graphic details and wild comparisons at her
audience in order to promote her cause. She gives little thought to the peace
of her son’s family life, and she does not hesitate to evoke the imagination of
little children. Terror, shock, graphic details—they are good enough tools to
promote a good cause. In a manner of speaking, this section presents
Elizabeth Costello declaring war against terror.
Elizabeth in Africa
Lesson five, the Humanities in Africa, is given by Blanche Costello, a Catholic
nun and Elizabeth’s sister. This time we experience everything through
Elizabeth. Blanche’s talk is a provocative, dogmatically Catholic attack on the
relevance of the humanities. Her talk is indeed a hard piece to digest in a col-
lege of the humanities but, after all, it is a coolly academic talk without evoca-
tive, emotional images. Ironically, in the previous lesson, Costello did all she
knew how in order to erase the distinction between human beings and ani-
mals; now in Africa, she is affronted by Blanche’s attack on humanism.
During one of their conversations, we are informed of Elizabeth’s thoughts,
“She does not like it when her sister gets on her high horse and preaches. It
happened during her speech in Johannesburg and it is happening again. All
that is most intolerant in Blanche’s character emerges at such times: intoler-
ant and rigid and bullying” (138).
The whole setting of Elizabeth’s lessons is reversed. Now Elizabeth is—in
vain, it seems—seeking out personal closeness with her sister, “on the brink
of passing” (155). During the previous lesson, Costello hardly recognized the
feelings of her family and never missed the opportunity to preach, to project
her intolerance and self-righteousness. Is this at all the same person? What has
happened to her, and her own sermons? The effect of introducing a sermo-
nizing and dogmatic sister is to relativize the previous Elizabeth herself.
While the thematic function of Elisabeth’s character was more prominent
when she preached about animals, she now recovers a lot of mimetic credi-
bility. We are about to become more familiar with Elizabeth than previously.
138 ● Matti Hyvärinen
trauma is able to catch people who were not originally subjected to it. The
concept was at first used to characterize the problem of intergenerational
and interpersonal transition from the extreme traumas of the Holocaust.
Historiographers and artists often disregard the fact that in studying trauma
intensively from the perspective of victims, perpetrators, or the immediate
spectators, they are themselves exposed to the effects of transitional trauma.
To put it simply, we are not inviolable. An artist or a scholar who delves into
trauma, into the inner workings of terror, is always at risk of repeating the
original trauma and terror emotionally. Eelco Runia (2004) gives a powerful
example of such “parallel processing” in the case of the official Dutch study
to the UN/Dutch failure in protecting the Muslim population in Srebrenica.
This problem of representing trauma and terror grows out of the prob-
lematic experience of trauma as such. Often trauma seems to be entirely inac-
cessible, without any proper memory of the event. Often the cognition and
emotion appear separately: either one remembers the event coolly, without
any touch of emotion, or one experiences the shocking emotion in the form
of acting out or repeating the original scene. There is however, as LaCapra con-
tinues to emphasize, a possibility of the partial working through of the trau-
matic experience. But because working through and acting out are not binary
oppositions, which could be kept in entirely separate worlds, the process of
working-through itself assumes elements or moments of the repetition of the
traumatic scene.
Elizabeth Costello, in this sixth lesson, is indeed negotiating over how
much she is ready to receive of the traumatic imagery in the form of sheer and
raw repetition at the risk of being traumatized and harmed herself. How
much should she justifiably presume of artistic and emotional working-
through, including an artistic distance to horror? I quote, “Obscene: not just
the deeds of Hitler’s executioners, not just the deeds of the blockman, but the
pages of Paul West’s black book too. Scenes that do not belong in the light of
day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from” (159).
Costello considers that West indeed is obsessed with a desire to go too
close to such evil. So we travel with her to the Free University of Amsterdam.
The day before her talk, Elizabeth learns that the writer Paul West will attend
the conference. This changes almost everything. She was prepared to talk
about an absent, unknown, and abstract novelist, and instead she has a con-
crete, flesh-and-blood author in the audience to deal with. In this rhetorical-
cum-ethical setting, the difference between implied author (Booth 1961) and
flesh-and-blood writer as a person is vital. Is she at all fair to Paul West? Is it at
all tolerable to say such things about the touch of evil to a person attending
her lecture? If I translate Elizabeth’s agony into the language I suggested
140 ● Matti Hyvärinen
earlier, we might ask whether Elizabeth’s own strong emotional and ethical
reaction against Paul West is one more moment of acting out the trauma or
not. In reacting to evil and the trauma it has issued forth, there is no site of
absolute goodness, no solid ethical ground with which to climb onto the
moral high horse of the earlier lessons.
Elizabeth’s agony leads to a desperate attempt to rewrite her whole talk.
She hectically tries to meet West in advance. In her musings, she questions
the soundness of her whole thought. West is a writer just as she is. Yet she rea-
sons that storytelling can open the bottle, and release the genie into the
world, “and it costs all hell to get him back in again” (167). This is exactly the
way trauma will be transferred. She concludes, momentarily, “Through
Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has
given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world” (167–68).
But Costello already ponders how West receives “thousands of defenders,”
and she instead will be recognized as an old-fashioned fool. She can hear the
defenders’ voice in her head, “Paul West is not a devil but a hero: he has ven-
tured into the labyrinth of Europe’s past and faced down the Minotaur and
returned to tell his tale” (168).
Immediately before her talk, Costello finds West sitting in the back row.
Awkwardly, she tries to make peace and mitigate in advance what she is going
to say. She is a speaker in a state of full disarray, trying to claim and erase at
the same time, to resist and criticize West while understanding him. Elizabeth
Costello now works remarkably hard in order to take her audience’s emotions
into account. The self-righteous air of earlier lessons has evaporated entirely.
Nevertheless, Paul West does not respond at all. After the lecture, no dis-
cussion arises between the two authors. Elizabeth tries to perceive at least
some reaction from his face, but “there is no sign she can detect, not at this
distance, just a short man in black on his way to the coffee machine” (176).
Costello escapes to the ladies’ room to once again ruminate her argument
back and forth. She ponders the source of the nauseating energy of the
description and concludes that it cannot be anyone other than West himself.
She recalls how she did not want to read the book but West had forced her to
do so by the sheer power of his narration. The problem of evil is thus a prob-
lem of writing as well. These ponderings lead her to an important self-reflec-
tion. She realizes that “she does the same thing, or used to do. Until she
thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people’s faces in, for
instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir,
casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already
filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man
with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal . . . as Hitler’s own
Too Much Terror? ● 141
man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle)” (179). Costello admits first
her complicity of writing and speaking in the same way as West, and delves
immediately into the thought again, subscribing to her old ideas but colored
now by the work of Paul West. It is remarkable that Costello is just thinking,
and not preaching. It is thus the narrator of the novel who commits himself
to the faults of West. West is thus not just an adversary; rather, he is an inte-
gral aspect of the problematic of writing.
Costello never meets West again, and she never learns of his reaction. The
image is powerful: mute and unresponsive Paul West going to fetch his cof-
fee, nervous and self-conscious Costello contemplating her talk in the shelter
of the ladies’ room. This image leaves open the possibility that West indeed is
touched by evil, knows the evil, and is unable to feel anything. Costello, on
the other hand, tries to find the answer in the peace of the ladies’ room, thus
finally missing the chance of dialogue. The image is also a perfect ending for
the section on evil, accentuating the fact that whatever we try to do with
trauma, a final peace and closure is inaccessible.
From yet another angle, the image shows the power of focalization. We are
invited to follow Costello’s inner thought but can only see the vacant exterior
of Paul West. What would have been our conclusions if we had been able to
see the possible turmoil and reflections inside West and met Costello again as
a rigid speaker disappearing soon after her talk?
finds her situation far from elevated and rather recognizes elements of the
gulag and Holocaust in her dormitory. Before the court, she offers a new for-
mulation. She writes: “I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a
secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my
calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is
given to me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their
soundness, to make sure I have heard them right” (199).
She reiterates her point: in her line of work, “belief is a resistance, an
obstacle” (200). Again, the judge challenges Costello’s whole humanity on
the basis that she does not believe in anything. Here, Elizabeth’s retort is an
elaboration of her position. She says, “To put it another way, I have beliefs
but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in.
My heart is not in them” (200). This last specification is important. Elizabeth
Costello does not maintain that she is entirely unlike the other humans;
instead, she once again points toward the difference of her roles as citizen and
writer. This is again to radicalize the contrast between Elizabeth-the-lecturer
and Elizabeth-the-author.
The judge eagerly takes the figure of “dictation secretary” and demands
answers about the voices she hears. What about the murdered Tasmanian
children, the almost annihilated people? Does she not hear their voices? Now
the judge is taking a more cunning position as regards the ethics of writing.
Costello has to admit that she can only dictate the voices she hears, nothing
more. Then she offers an even more questionable remark, “A word of caution
to you, however. I am open to all voices, not just the voices of the murdered
and violated . . . If it is their murderers and violators who choose to summon
me instead, to use me and speak through me, I will not close my ears to them,
I will not judge them” (204).
Costello has suddenly arrived problematically close to Paul West. If she
hears the voice of a murderer, must she also “release the genie,” without hope
of ever catching him again? Coetzee seems to accept the hearing of perpetra-
tors, but not giving them the whole energy and vividness of trauma. In any
case, Coetzee’s modest theory of writing seems to effectively cut short any
easy connection between the author and the statements of the characters. The
theory is by no means a literary whim, because similar ideas are recognizable
in his Disgrace (1999) and Slow Man (2005). However, does this theory of
writing as dictation undermine all attempts at political reading of the novel?
This is not the case. The project of Elizabeth Costello is not simply to
undermine and entirely erase Costello’s hectic talks. Recall Costello’s remark
on method: “I merely write down the words and then test them, test their
soundness, to make sure I have heard them right” (199). Assuming that
Too Much Terror? ● 143
Costello indeed speaks here on behalf of Coetzee, the author brings, in a gen-
uine democratic and civil meaning, the “true” voices around, as parts of the
drama. He does not need to take a definite position, as a writer. Politically
speaking, and on my analysis, the key theme of the novel is cruelty, and cru-
elty in its unending forms. Coetzee begins with the theme of cruelty against
animals, knits it together with the worst possible cruelty against humans, but
then turns the tables around to show how cruelty may be enacted by repre-
senting and circulating cruelty too graphically. Coetzee is undeniably a fierce
critic of the cruelty enacted on animals, but, just as clearly, he outlines
Costello’s politically sterile dogmatism in preaching her message.
In presenting all of the story-world debates, the novel systematically resists
easy mimetic identifications. From the early marks regarding realistic details
to the postscript (“Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos”), the implied author
keeps foregrounding the synthetic, textual function of the novel. How to
write a novel; how to hear the voices; how to be politically and ethically
responsible while writing; and how to speak about trauma are questions that
the novel foregrounds repeatedly.
The strongest ethos of the novel might ironically reside in listening, not in
lecturing. Does the Kafkaesque lesson At the Gate demonstrate a pressure to
have beliefs, opinions, solid identity, to commit to preaching a message? Do
the guards not implicate that “belief ” is that which distinguishes us from
“cattle”—from animals, and in this context, obviously from the Jews in the
cattle car? The judges and guards accuse Elizabeth of cynicism, of course,
because she does not volunteer to join the choir of having deep beliefs. In her
erasure of firm identity and firm beliefs, she privileges the performance of the
reader. She says, and here arguably reflecting the thoughts of the author, “On
my humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me,
what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own
emptiness in that respect” (201).
The point is no longer Costello’s humanity or virtuosity. What matters is
the complex ethical and rhetorical performance of the novel and the ways
readers react. Terror and trauma are not disease-like natural phenomena that
could straightforwardly be represented and fought against; rather, such out-
raged reactions seem problematically to partake in the cultural circulation
and expanding of trauma. The objectivistic and distanced approach of Paul
West is ethically as questionable as Costello’s originally militant stance toward
terror and trauma. The reign of terror may continue in discursive, textual
forms, but these discursive struggles are vital in (re)defining something as ter-
ror. Coetzee uses the novelistic form, indeed the novel of ideas, to resist the
wish for morally and politically absolute positions in regard to terror and
144 ● Matti Hyvärinen
cruelty. The dilemma, for a political scientist, is then to recognize this com-
plex of narrative thinking, reevaluations, and erasures, and not merely to
identify Elizabeth Costello’s early, militant declarations.
References
Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the theory of narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Booth, Wayne C. 1961. The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 2005. Slow man. London: Secker & Warburg.
———. 2004. Elizabeth Costello. London: Vintage.
———. 1999. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg.
Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative discourse. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell.
Original edition, “Discourse du Recit,” a portion of Figures III, Editions du Seuil
1972.
Herman, David. 2002. Story logic: Problems and possibilities of narrative. Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press.
LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press.
———. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Martell, Yann. 2002. Life of Pi: A novel. Edinburgh: Cannongate.
McEwan, Ian. 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.
Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press.
Phelan, James. 2005. Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative fiction. Contemporary poetics. 2nd ed.
London and New York: Routledge.
Runia, Eelco. 2004. “Forget about it”: “Parallel processing” in the Srebrenica Report.
History and Theory 43 (3): 295–320.
Updike, John. 2006. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
PART 3
Governmental Terror
CHAPTER 8
Caterina Preda
If politics is power, and art liberty, then art in a totalitarian state becomes not
only a provocation—as it is for any authority, but no more, nor less than the
enemy.
—Manea 2005, 51
Introduction
S
eptember 11, 1973, La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace in
Santiago, was bombed by military airplanes; smoke rose from the debris
while democracy was annihilated. On December 22, 1989, the first-
ever televised revolution was aired; shots were fired as the last soviet satellite,
Romania, collapsed. These two powerful images (and at the same time repre-
sentations) made the tour of the world and marked international conscious-
ness. They represent the beginning of one regime and the end of another.
This chapter inquires into what happened between these two landmarks. And
even more specifically, what occurred in these two regimes in respect to the
relations between art and politics?
The main research question of this chapter concerns the transformations of
the artistic field in nondemocratic settings (both cultural policies and culture as
resistance). The question is subdivided into two separate lines of investiga-
tion: What are the strategies of the two regimes in relation to the arts? And
how does the artistic space react? These two questions cannot be entirely
148 ● Caterina Preda
metaphorical, they use symbols to describe the present they cannot portray
directly).
Moreover, in order to deploy our analysis, the first section seeks to first
reconstruct the context by answering the broad double-question, what are the
characteristics of the two regimes? and even more importantly, what are their
main differences? In a later section, we will deal with the (dis)similarities of the
two regimes discussed here in what relates to artistic developments.
regime. Thus, Congress was abolished, with the junta assuming the legislative
power while the president of the junta was in charge of the executive power
as supreme chief of the nation (Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda 2001, 42).
The parties of the Unidad Popular (UP) were outlawed, while the others were
suspended—until 1977 when they were also outlawed (Collier and Sater
1999, 307; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda 2001, 217). Furthermore, all
national institutions, from universities to the football federation, were
placed under the direct control of the military (Collier and Sater 1999,
307). Finally, the institutionalization of the regime was consecrated by the
1980 Constitution that safeguarded the enduring power of General Augusto
Ugarte Pinochet.
Conversely, upon the death of Romania’s first communist leader, Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej, in March 1965, Nicolae Ceauşescu was nominated first sec-
retary of the Romanian Communist Party. The communist regime, estab-
lished with the aid of the Soviets in 1947, had meanwhile witnessed the
Stalinization of the country. This process achieved three ambitious purposes:
in the first place, the economy was transformed into one that was centrally
planned and state-owned through the nationalization of the primary means
of production; in the second place, Stalinization also meant heavy industri-
alization and collectivization of agriculture; thirdly, it implied the imposi-
tion of a soviet blueprint on the cultural sphere: socialist realism. This is the
setting in which Ceauşescu assumed power. Furthermore, his regime can be
broken down into two periods, though not so clearly demarcated: 1965 to
1971, an apparent liberalization and the establishment of the myth of
Dictators and Dictatorships ● 151
Latin American model) and the promotion of exports, leading to a new solid
growth of the Chilean economy (Collier and Sater 1999, 317).
As to the ideological level, the two regimes appeared to stand at opposite
sides of the spectrum: on the one side, the Romanian communist regime with
strong nationalistic accents, especially in the second period of Ceauşescu’s
reign of power, and on the other, the Pinochet regime professing profound
anticommunist sentiments and the salvation of Chile through an emphasis
on the nationalist mold and on the traditional values. Strong nationalism is
thus combined with two opposed ideological positions approached by the
divergent regimes.
The use of terror is undeniable in the two configurations. The establish-
ment of the tragically famous Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA),
directly placed under the control of Pinochet, led the repression to unbear-
able heights.3 Following a series of international attacks under the transna-
tional Operación Condor, DINA was dismantled in August 1977 and replaced
with the Central Nacional de Información (CNI) that inherited the personnel
of the former agency and continued, until the end of the regime, its infamous
practices: murders, disappearances, and torture.
In Romania, the Securitate (the General Direction of the People’s Security),
created in August 1948, was, until the end of the Ceauşescu regime, the arti-
san behind a general sentiment of insecurity (through the systematic use of
fear and terror, persecution, and by threat of the nonchoice of prison versus
exile—interior and exterior), and of “national pessimism,” to use Vladimir
Tismăneanu’s expression. As an effect of the action of these two parallel sys-
tems of fear, two types of societies were created. In the Romanian case, we can
identify what Mary Fulbrook has labeled “participatory dictatorship” (in the
case of the GDR), and at the other end of the spectrum, in Chile, we could
depict an “exclusory dictatorship.” Fulbrook uses the notion of participatory
dictatorship so as to “underline the ways in which the people themselves were
at one and the same time both constrained and affected by, and yet also
actively and often voluntarily carried, the ever changing social and political
system of the GDR” (2005, 12).
A different logic reigned under Pinochet: the declared aim of the regime
was to purge Chilean society of all political influence, especially pertaining to
the communist ideology but not restricted to it; this ranged from purging all
institutions of the left-wingers, dismantlement of all cultural activities (both
institutionally and physically by repressing the “opponents”) or of certain
professions. By means of exclusion and prohibition (forbiddance), the Pinochet
regime tried to consolidate an apolitical dictatorship, transforming paradoxi-
cally any act into a politically articulated one.
Dictators and Dictatorships ● 153
The two regimes end in different manners, although the date is the same,
1989. In Chile, by the 1980 Constitution, Pinochet assumed the first man-
date of president (1981–89), following which, in 1988, a referendum estab-
lished whether or not he was to remain in power for another eight years
(1989–97). The 1988 referendum, however, rejected by a margin of 54 per-
cent his duration in power. Pinochet nonetheless safeguarded, until 1997, his
role as commander in chief of the armed forces and afterwards gained immu-
nity through a mandate as senator for life. At his death in December 2006,
half of Chile celebrated, while the other half mourned the loss of one of its
greatest leaders. The Romanian regime, by contrast, was the last domino of
the communist regimes in Eastern Europe to fall in December of 1989.
Nicolae Ceauşescu was tried in a furtive manner and thereafter executed on
Christmas day.
unified policy stemming from the government and leading to cultural subde-
velopment (Henríquez Moya 2004).
As such, in the Romanian case, there is a triad/totalitarian triangle of
the state-party artists that had complete control over all artistic creations
(Cârneci 2001, 20). The same applies to the situation of writers, filmmakers,
musicians, and architects; in 1947, the “communist cultural revolution” was
set by the Congress of the Union of Trade-Unions of Artists, Writers, and
Journalists. From then on, art was placed under the control of the state and
was declared to be an ideological arm, an instrument of political power
(Cârneci 2001, 17). So, was the background setting of the Ceauşescu regime
identical to that which ushered in the communist rule in Romania? Formally
yes, but the subsequent evolution and the timid artistic liberalization of the
late 1960s to the early 1970s was annulled by the July 1971 theses of
Ceauşescu that triggered the “mini-cultural revolution” à la Roumaine. Artists
were suddenly assigned new tasks that they had to achieve; moreover, they
had to create fully in the spirit of the “multilaterally developed society”
(Romania became a closed society, where artists could hardly know what hap-
pened in the western hemisphere or, even less, travel or exchange ideas with
foreign colleagues).
There is a generally accepted conclusion that the Pinochet regime did not
imagine a clearly defined project regarding the role the arts should play, what
functions they should assume (Brunner, Garretón). The policy adopted would
be a negative one, based on interdictions and exclusions (the regime denies,
forbids). Though there existed an initial program of cultural content and a
certain preoccupation relating to the artistic space, the Pinochet govern-
ment only proclaimed intentions (Política cultural del Gobierno, 1975) that
remained at the project stage and that was not concretized within a specific
policy. During the Pinochet regime, there was continuity in the actions of the
government concerning artistic creation, more precisely, in the sense of artis-
tic extension as a constant policy of the Ministry of Education but also in
the sense of the development of an apolitical art—a function delegated by the
regime to the private companies, in accordance with the impetus that the
market model imposed.
Despite this negative type of project, in the approach of the Pinochet
regime, a number of ideological references and tendencies can be identified:
nationalism looking to refound Chile on the basis of the original principles,
those of the Portalian Republic (conservatism—traditional Catholicism and
National Security Doctrine); neoliberalism promoting the market as the unique
articulator of artistic expressions; and finally a mass(-ive) culture-oriented pol-
icy supported by the market, but also promoted by the state (television is
Dictators and Dictatorships ● 155
new fields; Brunner and Catalán 1985, 41). Conversely, the cinema in exile
(the most important directors having left the country) produced around
ninety films in the same period with such works as It Rains on Santiago
(Helvio Soto), The Calm Reigns in All the Country (Pether Lilienthal and
Antonio Skarmeta), or The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman; Sarget 1996,
256). Most of the important cinematographic creations of the period were
thus found not inside the country, but among the works of the exiled direc-
tors. Finally, there was an important decrease in cinematographic consump-
tion in favor of television.
Romanian cinema, for its part, developed in an important manner with
such preferred subjects as grand historic dramas (e.g., Mihai Viteazul), per-
sonalized socialist dramas and comedies, or moralizing film series (such as
the hit cinema series portraying Commissar Moldovan). Likewise in
Romania, there were certain directors that could choose exile so as to gain
artistic freedom—such as Lucian Pintilie, whose 1971 film Reconstituirea
(Reconstitution) was censored.
Chilean theater was also affected by the institutional dismantling: theater
schools and companies were simply closed down. The regime later imposed a
return to classic theater and all references to contemporary Chile were sup-
pressed (Jofre 1989, 78). Independent theater thereafter developed in two
directions: commercial comedies (café-concert); and a critical approach to
the dictatorship, a means by which to transmit the malaise of the disadvan-
taged (testimonial theater; Jofre 1989, 78).
In Romania, no private theater companies could be created whatsoever;
indeed, all artistic creation in this sphere was dominated and controlled by
state policy. Apart from theatrical oeuvres portraying the life inside the fac-
tory, or in the villages (and the development of artistic creations stemming
from amateurs), a classic repertory was tolerated. During performances, how-
ever, actors could nonetheless slip past censorship (besides preliminary cen-
sorship, at each presentation there was also a censor in the theater hall) by
introducing lizards (the term designating the political allusions in the double
language) of the texts.
The fifth is music and national festivals. A common preferred means of
artistic expression was, in both cases, the organization of national festivals
(Cântarea României versus Festival de Viña) with a quite pronounced auto-
chthonic and nationalistic twist promoting folklore and popular culture.
Moreover, the articulation of these state-controlled artistic manifestations
was imagined so as to provide an alternative to the “subversive” cultural pro-
ductions and, simultaneously, to the Western influences as well. Conversely,
Dictators and Dictatorships ● 159
music as resistance is visible in the two spaces. In the Chilean case, this type
of music is visible both inside the country and in exile (perhaps the most
famous musicians of the period, performing in exile, include Inti-Illimani
and Quilapayún). Moreover, Chile had an important precoup local tradition
combining social and political protest songs with folklore in the form of la
nueva cancion chilena,8 later developing into the canto nuevo. In the Romanian
case, we find similar manifestations in the songs of Phoenix and the allusive
songs of Alexandru Andrieş.9 Moreover, in the Chilean case, adjacent to the
contestation coming from the nueva canción, a different type of opposition to
the regime appears, one that pertains to the youth and that was most felt in
music groups like Los Prisonieros, the most well-known group of its kind. This
generation contested the regime, but did not identify with the peñas or the
folkloric manifestations.
Sixth is television and radio. Though not strictly considered as a means of
artistic expression, television and radio as important means of mass commu-
nication are also taken into consideration here. The Pinochet regime,
through the market model it imposed, completely modified the way in which
Chileans articulated their lives. Furthermore, through the state of emergency
and the nocturnal curfew (almost permanent during the seventeen years of
dictatorship), Chileans were confined to their homes having a sole means of
escape: television. The generalization of television (the national channels cov-
ered almost 90 percent of the territory and there was a television set in almost
every home) did not reflect the surrounding reality for it offered for the most
part entertainment programs (contests, shows, and soap operas), which, in
turn, led to the alteration of the logic of sociability of Chileans (Brunner and
Catalán 1987, 21). Chilean television reflected one reality, the one the regime
acquiesced to.
If, in Chile, the Pinochet regime’s preferred channel for the official culture
was television, in Romania, the television was restricted to the two hours of
daily news programming that, every evening, presented the new accomplish-
ments of the people and, most of all, presented those of the leader himself,
Ceauşescu. It is interesting to note in this sense that, as opposed to the
restricted television programs, the official radio channel transmitted unin-
terruptedly. In the Romanian case, it also has to be taken into account that
the Munich-based Radio Free Europe, sponsored by the American State
Department, marked public consciousness in the 1980s. Romanians could
usually find out what was happening inside the country by listening to its
transmissions from Munich.
160 ● Caterina Preda
Conclusion
Our brief inquiry presented a set of considerations that allow the comparison
of two artistic spaces modified by two modern dictatorships, those of General
Pinochet and Ceauşescu. The two regimes are found to exist on opposing
sides on more than one coordinate. From an ideological point of view, it can
easily be seen that the Pinochet regime relied on an ideological sum of prin-
ciples such as the supreme market logic, a national security doctrine, and a
combination of traditional and national values. The Ceauşescu regime, on
the other hand, departing from communism (and its cultural version, social-
ist realism) imposed a new model: that of the cult of the leader (and later of
the dictatorial couple) combined with a strong nationalist variable. From the
economic point of view (and its impact on the arts), we find, on the one side,
a declared intent to impose a market model on the entire societal corpus, and
on the other side, we have the stated aim to enforce up to the extremes a
totally controlled state model. Insofar as common traits can be identified, it
can be said that both rulers gradually abandoned the principle of collegiality
that marked each of their departure points. They both assumed the supreme
titles of president and commander in chief of their nations in 1974. In addi-
tion, a higher or lower degree of personalization of power can be traced in
both cases. Moreover, the two dictators rely on the secret police to consoli-
date their hold on power and to eliminate their adversaries, as well as to main-
tain a general sentiment of fear. It would thus appear that the two who
“would have been adversaries” find themselves mirrored here.
Nonetheless, though situated at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum,
these two regimes are paradigmatic in support of the hypothesis announced
at the beginning of this essay: a dictatorial setting replaces the cultural expres-
sions with manifestations that conform to its political imaginary. Even if their
strategies as well as the reactions they trigger differ, they are comparable.
Thus, if the Ceauşescu regime set out to create a homogenous artistic sphere
where any creation was to follow the official guidelines, it did not accomplish
its goal since artists first paid their public tribute and then, afterwards, dedi-
cated themselves to their artistic endeavors in a private sphere. It can be said,
nonetheless, that by the consolidation of the myth of permanence, the regime
dissuaded any type of opposition, “national pessimism” becoming the norm
that defined the endless horizon. In its project of political cleansing and reor-
ganization, the regime of Pinochet included the artistic space. Accordingly,
this was first purged of any influence that could be traced back to commu-
nism or any variant of leftist ideology. In a second stage, all state subsidies
were cut and the market model was imposed. Furthermore, a consumer type
of culture was created—having as its official channel television. The arts were
Dictators and Dictatorships ● 161
separated from society at large and began creating an alternative space where
they contested the imposed model. By trying to annihilate the artistic oppo-
sition, the Pinochet regime encouraged (albeit involuntarily) a critical space
that was ultimately used by the political opposition.
The dimensions of the absurd that this type of dictatorial regime engen-
ders are hardly quantifiable. What this type of study attempts is to merely rec-
ollect the images, the fragments of imagined worlds, and the sounds of two
parallel time sequences (and spaces) that are found to coincide in the fine
nuances and to place them in a political science perspective, hopefully giving
rise to new patterns and ways of processing this genre of terror at the level of
the society at large.
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Notes
1. This article represents a resumé of the theme of my doctoral dissertation pre-
pared at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Science, to be submit-
ted in October 2008.
2. Decree No. 806 designated as president of the Republic, the President of the
Junta, chief of the executive and supreme chief of the nation (Cavallo et al.
2001, 90).
3. Such was the case with the Estadio Nacional, one of the main places of deten-
tion during the first months. The other “landmark” of the repression was Villa
Grimaldi, one of the most important sites of imprisonment and torture in the
capital of Santiago. The international attacks were perpetrated against the exiled
Gen. Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires (September 1974), the failed attack against
Bernardo Leighton, ex-chief of the Christian Democrats in Rome (October
1975), and the assassination of Allende’s ex-ambassador to Washington,
Orlando Letelier (September 1976).
4. The term “Escena de Avanzada” is associated with the art critic Nelly Richard
(see Richard 1987).
5. Cioroianu observes that all the artistic representations of Ceauşescu’s cult seem
as if the Conducător would have painted them himself, if only he would have
known how (see Cioroianu 2006, 251).
6. See, e.g., the album: Chinese Propaganda Posters, 2003, Köln: Taschen.
7. Interview with Manuel Alcides Jofre, November 21, 2006, Santiago de Chile.
8. The symbols of Victor Jara, assassinated in September 1973, and of Violeta
Parra are still important in Chile nowadays and were the milestones of this new
direction in Chilean music.
9. Listen for example to “La Telejurnal” (from 1980) or “Mie mi-e somn” (from
1983) included in the album Interzis (Forbidden), released immediately after
1990. The album is characterized by the author himself as a “collection of anti-
communist follies”; see http://alexandries.free.fr.
CHAPTER 9
Minna Valjakka
Introduction
T
his chapter focuses on how propaganda posters were used by the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the means of effective govern-
mental control during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Most of
the propaganda posters do not include images of terror but, on the contrary,
overtly beautiful and happy moments of life. Despite this, however, the
posters engendered traumatic experiences and fear among people. Therefore,
I suggest that aside from the posters’ main task in serving as an obvious means
of effective governmental control, they also provoked mental terror among
people. As a result, they can be seen as a weapon of governmental terrorism
employed against its own people.
Definitions of terror and terrorism are often complex and even controver-
sial. For example, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
states on its Web site that UN Member States have not yet agreed on their
definition of terrorism (UNODC 2007). In short, “terror” is usually meant
in terms of an emotional state expressing extreme fear; as a result, “terrorism”
is synonymous with “system of terror” (Waciorski 1939, 24–31; in Crenshaw
Hutchinson 1972, 383). Sometimes, terrorism is seen as just an act of vio-
lence, but in a broader sense, it is usually seen as a systematic method of
166 ● Minna Valjakka
Physical acts of terror, acts of violence, are just one form of propaganda,
which aims to achieve political goals. In China, state propaganda directed
toward the people was manifested mainly through the arts. Especially during
the Cultural Revolution, omnipresent propaganda posters were an effective
system used to manipulate the masses. As Evans and Donald state, posters
“are graphic reminders of mass insecurity, arbitrary violence, and personal
trauma.” Furthermore, they tentatively mention the possibility that posters
might even endow terror to everyday life (Evans and Donald 1999, 5, 10). In
this chapter, I will argue that by subjugating recipients continuously to didac-
tic visual communication, posters clearly engendered psychological chaos and
terror among the people.
With the aid of historical research, I will discuss the relationship between
the CCP and the arts, which was officially formed in the beginning of the
1940s. This historical background is the prerequisite for the later usage of
propaganda posters. Secondly, my aim is to clarify how propaganda posters
were used as effective governmental control during the Cultural Revolution.
The main questions focus on what subject matter they depicted and, most
importantly, how they depicted it. Furthermore, I will discuss the kind of
reactions these posters provoked among people. I suggest that the propa-
ganda posters fostered chaos and mental terror employing the four main top-
ics they depicted: Chairman Mao, agitation, socialist utopia, and heroic
models. Thirdly, I will briefly show what effects art had on artists themselves
Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control ● 167
during and after the Cultural Revolution. For example, what was their situa-
tion as professional artists? Finally, I will briefly discuss how the government’s
terror against its own people is actually visible in the art after the Cultural
Revolution. Traumatic experiences of those chaotic years are depicted espe-
cially in literature, but also in the visual arts termed scar art (shanghen yishu).
were used to depict the cruelty of Japanese soldiers in order to encourage peo-
ple to resist the occupation. However, the agitation-inciting, Western-influ-
enced woodcuts did not appeal to the peasants. As a consequence, in the
1940s, the style of the pictures was renewed, indeed, to be made appropriate
for use as propaganda. This new, more easily acceptable style combined the
visual and compositional elements from New Year pictures with the more
realistic expressions of woodblock prints, which finally pushed aside the
expressionist style of the 1930s (see, e.g., Laing 1988, 9–15; Landsberger
1995, 22–23, 33–34; Andrews 1994, 16–18).
As mentioned, the CCP used the art as a powerful tool to promote the rev-
olution right from the beginning. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework of
the arts was not set until 1942 when Mao Zedong clearly defined the role of
the arts in his speeches at the Yan’an forum on literature and art (Mao 1967,
1–44; see also Chang 1980, 5–7; Galikowski 1998, 5, 21):
In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes
and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for
art’s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or indepen-
dent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian
revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels on the whole rev-
olutionary machine. Therefore, Party work in literature and art occupies a def-
inite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is
subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolution-
ary period. (Mao 1967, 25)
According to Mao, the aim of the forum was “to ensure that revolutionary lit-
erature and art follow the correct path of development and provide better
help to other revolutionary work in facilitating the overthrow of our national
enemy and the accomplishment of the task of national liberation” (1967, 1).
More interestingly, the aim was also “to ensure that literature and art fit well
into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate
as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking
and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with
one heart and one mind” (2). These statements include verbal violence and,
more significantly, clearly define the arts as powerful weapons. They incorpo-
rated violence in the arts and fashioned it to serve politics.
This definition set the main requirements for appropriate art and was the
most important guideline until the death of Mao in 1976. Accordingly, art
was to be closely related to politics, serve the masses, and depict the real life
of the people—but in an idealistic, exquisite style. The life of the people was
the only true source for the arts, but should rather be more vividly expressed
Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control ● 169
than real life. The aim was the unity of ideological content and the perfection
of artistic expression. This meant that, although the political meaning was the
most important requirement in art, the artistic values should not be underes-
timated since an artistically unqualified work did not have an ability to
express the meanings (see, e.g., Mao 1967, 30; Galikowski 1998, 5, 21–24;
Chang 1980, 7–8).
The CCP’s theory of art was influenced by the socialist realism from the
Soviet Union. The Marxist view of art is based on the theory of reflection,
consisting of two aspects. Firstly, art is meant to depict the objects in a very
detailed, scientific likeness; in other words, they were to produce a mirror
image of the real object. This approach is “material realist.” Secondly, the aim
of art is to produce a mirror image of an ideal world, not the material world.
This approach is “objective idealism,” which is based on Plato’s idea of univer-
sal form. As a result, socialist realism is an outcome of these two approaches: a
reflection of the materialistic world combined with idealistic elements, bright
colors, and dramatic compositions. Socialist realist art in China followed the
art in the Soviet Union. Art was clearly used to combine the present day’s real-
ity while following the future’s ideals (Galikowski 1998, 37–39).
After this initial phase, when the People’s Republic of China was estab-
lished in 1949, a new phase in the relationship between art and politics was
begun. The two fundamental objectives of the Party were to legitimate and
maintain its power and enlist the artists to participate in the continuing
process of socialist revolution. Most of the artworks since 1949 are politi-
cal, although not all the art was socialist realist. The monotony of artworks
was also criticized and artists tried to promote the usage of different styles.
Unfortunately, the subject matters were reiterated and artworks became
poor in both quality and expression (Galikowski 1998, 9–10, 37–41; Laing
1988, 20–23).
An essential aspect in the relationship between the Party and art was the
total control it exercised over the artists. The three main domains of control
were organizational structures, ideological scheme, and political and ideolog-
ical movements. During the years 1956 to 1966, uncertainty was the domi-
nating feature among artists and intellectuals. The Party’s policy was constantly
changing with different campaigns, which was marked by significant fluctu-
ations in the relationship between artists and authorities. The most effective
change according to propaganda posters was the Great Leap Forward cam-
paign, which was launched in 1958 to promote production. This campaign
strongly affected the arts and artists, which were strictly governed by the
Party. Art was produced directly for political needs. “Amateur artists” were
promoted to the most important roles in art production, which stressed
170 ● Minna Valjakka
quantity and “popularization.” After the Great Leap Forward, the situation
calmed down temporarily and the mass production of art was reduced. In any
case, already in 1962 the atmosphere had begun to tighten up once again and
this attitude gradually strengthened until the total political control over art
during the Cultural Revolution (Galikowski 1998, 78–114).
On the other hand, several model books for creating appropriate posters
were produced (Gittings 1999, 32). These drawing manuals are one reason
for the similar appearance and likeness between pictures. For example, exactly
the same person can be found in posters that were printed in different places
and times (see, e.g., pictures in Landsberger 1995, 57).
Previous researches have analyzed different features of the posters, but the
overall summary is still lacking. Despite the variation, I argue that the posters
do have three main features. The first important common feature is the use
of the positive role models as central figures, which, furthermore, was used to
promote understanding of the central message. Emphasizing the heroic
model was a commonly used method and is based on Jiang Qing’s idea of
“three prominences” (san tuchu) (Evans and Donald 1999, 4; Landsberger
1995, 27–28, 40).
The second main feature is the overall clarity of expression, which also
emphasized the main message. Posters had to be immediately understandable
by a large group of different types of people, so the main message of the
poster was simplified. Especially the relationship between what was accept-
able and what was not was boldly depicted, sometimes even creating rather
naïve representations. Key figures and terms were continuously repeated.
Besides these compositional means, posters included headlines or phrases,
which strictly guided the correct understanding of the message. As a result,
although the posters represented a multilevel symbolism, the main meaning
was instantly readable (see, e.g., Evans and Donald 1999, 4, 18; Clunas 1999,
48, 55–57).
The third typical feature is the realistic expression combined with ideal-
ism. Realism was emphasized and artists were sent to farms and to workplaces
in order to observe how the work was actually done. Learning from the
masses was a prerequisite for appropriate art. For example, the correctness in
depicting work was so important that artists might even consult with work-
ers before finishing sketches as paintings (Gittings 1999, 38–39; Galikowski
1998, 64–65). In spite of this, for example, Evans and Donald suggest, and I
agree, that the posters did not reflect social reality (Evans and Donald 1999,
1). Instead, the posters created a socialist utopia, which people would and
should strive for. In them, people are determined and gazing trustfully into
the future. Faces are glowing with enthusiasm, eyes are shining, and the
widely smiling mouths reveal bright white teeth. But, how real was this in
actuality? Nobody looks tired or exhausted; nothing is broken, old, or even
dirty. The pictures create a belief in a common, happy future, where nothing
is worth complaining about.
172 ● Minna Valjakka
Chairman Mao
It has been estimated that about 2.2 billion portraits of Mao Zedong were
produced during the Cultural Revolution. Especially at the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution, most of the posters depicted Chairman Mao. The per-
sonality cult of Mao was very strongly promoted and left no one uninformed
about Mao’s ideology. The cult was highly politicized and its main character-
istics were the mobilization of masses, violence, and the teaching of ideology.
The amount, variety, and omnipresence of the visual material were so over-
whelming that it did not leave the possibility to question Mao’s status
(Benewick 1999, 123–27; Gittings 1999, 28–35). At least one official por-
trait of Chairman Mao had to be in every home, office, and workplace
(Gittings 1999, 28).
Officially, Mao was described as the Great Leader, Great Teacher, Supreme
Commander, and Great Helmsman. As Chairman Mao, he represented all
these roles simultaneously. In addition to these characters, artists had to por-
tray Mao also as a young scholar or the inspirer of the revolution, for
instance. In many posters, Mao is depicted above the masses as the Great
Leader of the whole nation, or as the red sun whose glory will lead the people
into a bright future (see, e.g., Benewick 1999, 123–30). In these posters, I
maintain that he is often portrayed like a god guiding the people (see, e.g.,
“Chairman Mao is the red sun in the hearts of the people of every land” in
Min et al. 2003, 110).
Many times, Mao is also portrayed as a father figure, a great teacher, or as
a revolutionary hero. In these posters, he is more humanlike, although not a
commoner. One of the most famous posters, “Chairman Mao goes to
Anyuan,” belongs in this category. The poster was extremely popular and it
became the symbol of the Cultural Revolution (see, e.g., Gittings 1999, 35;
Evans and Donald 1999, 9; Benewick 1999, 124–25). In this poster, Mao’s
174 ● Minna Valjakka
Agitation
A small number of the posters reveal any signs at all directly related to terror
or violence. Most of the posters depict production, agriculture, and other
nonviolent themes. In fact, this lack of violence in posters can also be
regarded as one reason for creating confusion and fear; indeed, during the
Cultural Revolution, different kinds of violent acts and terror, such as riots,
fights, and the destruction of buildings, did occur. Even beatings, humilia-
tions, and executions occurred in public places as depicted in photographs
and memoirs (see, e.g., Li 2003, 95, 101, 106, 111). This obvious conflict
between posters and reality may have induced disorientation among people
because the messages of the desired behavior were contradictory. The world
of posters mainly showed harmonious living and working together, but in
practice, this was impossible while Red Guards were on the rampage, espe-
cially in urban areas.
Posters depicting actual physical attacks scarcely exist, but different levels
of violence are present in some posters. Mental violence is depicted, for exam-
ple, in a poster where a group of people is verbally criticizing a person in the
middle (see “A bad element is publicly criticized,” in Min et al. 2003, 110).
In some posters, violence is depicted in a very vague form, as in the presence
of a gun when a member of the people’s militia is standing guard. Guns are
depicted also in posters about meetings, demonstrations, and militia training
of soldiers, women, or even children. In some posters, a brush or tools can
be depicted in threatening positions combined with angered expressions. As
176 ● Minna Valjakka
such, they literally become the weapons of revolution as Mao defined them
to be.
However, violence is most clearly present in agitation posters. In some,
there is quite a distressing level of violence present: fierce expressions of
hatred portraying desired attitudes against both foreign and internal enemies.
Sometimes fists in the air are depicted as being even bigger than the face in
order to emphasize power (see also Gittings 1999, 32). Correct attitudes were
taught also to children with violence, as in the poster where children were
depicted mocking a snowman dressed as a class enemy (see “Punish the ras-
cal!” in Min et al. 2003, 63).
This kind of agitation, embedded with either hidden or obvious violence,
was easily readable at any level of expression and was distressing to the people
living in such a chaotic environment. Although most of the posters do not
show real acts of violence, the agitation can be seen to promote the violence
and even be seen as a precondition for it. Besides, for those victims who had
already been terrorized by the Red Guards, these posters could evoke similar
feelings to those they experienced during the acts of violence: humiliation
and even terror. Also for those who were supposed to act accordingly and
attack their relatives against their own will, these agitation posters may have
given rise to mental contradiction and fear. As a consequence, I suggest that,
overall, the agitation posters can be seen as causing mental violence and ter-
ror among people.
actually very hard work in poor conditions. Everyday life was tough,
resources often insufficient, and usually even meals were meager. Anchee Min
also writes about how life was so unbearable in the collective labor farm that
many youths even injured themselves purposely so that they could claim dis-
ability and return home again (Min 2003, 5; also Duo 2003, 10–11).
Nothing like this is depicted in the posters, in which there are no maladies or
shortage of anything. Quite the contrary, everything is new, harvests are plen-
tiful and everyone works happily (see, e.g., the posters “Spring rain,”
“Planting rice by machine is wonderful,” or “What a pleasure it is not to bend
our backs while planting rice!” in Min et al. 2003, 172–73).
Facing a completely unexpected reality can be quite a traumatic experi-
ence. How does one handle the situation in which everything one is told
seems to be untrue? In such circumstances, one is easily caught up in a men-
tal conflict: whether to question “the truth” that is told, the reality in which
you live, or your own understanding of that reality.
Heroic Models
A similar contradiction could have been elicited by the posters of heroic mod-
els that were created for women, children, and men. Landsberger states that a
model should be recognizable and common enough so the viewer could see
similar elements of one’s own life in the model (Landsberger 1995, 27). I also
think that the presumed effectiveness of these role models was based on two
features that the models could be recognized and/or identified with, but these
methods are employed differently with two categories of models. Several
posters portraying well-known heroes, like Lei Feng, Liu Hulan, and Pan
Dongzi were made and distributed. In these, the recognition factor of a well-
known person made sure that the viewer would, first of all, identify the role
model correctly. Secondly, a viewer could also identify with the famous per-
son, imagine becoming like the model. On the other hand, anonymous pos-
itive role models were depicted in numerous posters. Posters showed
common people, men, women, and children, acting bravely. The common-
ness of the figure made these posters effective: anyone could and would iden-
tify themselves with these models; “anyone” could be the main character.
In one interesting poster, called “Shell horn called,” in the background,
people with guns are riding bicycles into a fight. At the front, as a central fig-
ure in the poster, is a young determined mother on her way out the door of
her home: she is going into this fight armed with a pitchfork and a sleeping
baby tied onto her back (Xiao 2002, 85). This poster rouses questions about
178 ● Minna Valjakka
realistic behavior: would a mother really act like that? Were Chinese women
supposed to put the revolution first, despite the risk it posed to their children?
It seems that this was indeed the case. The posters’ main idea was to show
the model, the ideal person, devoted to the revolution regardless of any other
consideration. In other words, posters determined what one should be. By
emphasizing an identification with the main characters of such posters, they
also gave the viewer strength to believe that one day, after some diligence and
hard work, one would become “one of them,” a model for others. But if one
did not fulfill the expectations, one was to be considered at least a failure, if
not a counterrevolutionary. If one lived under this kind of governmental con-
trol for years as a teenager, how was one expected to escape being affected?
How is one’s personality shaped in such a conflict? I argue that these propa-
ganda posters, by subjugating recipients to imaginary heroic models, caused
insecurity, confusion, and even fear. Especially the main target group, the
youth, was fascinated by the heroic models and was seized with enthusiasm to
follow their example, but in the end felt distressed if they fell short of their
own expectations. Moreover, questioning the models was not actually possi-
ble. If one criticized them, one might be reported by friends or relatives as a
counterrevolutionary. So, in order to maintain physical and mental health, it
was better to follow the masses and the heroic models.
Chinese youth responded to the posters in many ways. Posters aroused
admiration, but also mental chaos, frustration, and uncertainty of the truth.
According to Chen’s memoirs, she grew up in a culture where posters
reminded, replayed, educated, and reeducated what she was and what society
expected of her. Chen wished to become like the role models and she tire-
lessly competed with her classmates who exercised the best in revolutionary
standards: diligence, obedience, and humbleness (Chen 1999, 101–19). A
similar experience is recorded by Anchee Min, who writes, “I wanted to be
the girl in the poster when I was growing up. Every day I dressed up like that
girl in a white cotton shirt with a red scarf around my neck, and I braided my
hair the same way. I liked the fact that I was surrounded by the revolutionary
martyrs, whom I was taught to worship since kindergarten. . . . I continued
to dream that one day I would be honored to have an opportunity to sacrifice
myself for Mao, and become the girl in the poster” (Min 2003, 5).
Such posters can be compared to today’s advertisements and the illusion-
ist world they create. How many of us have, at least sometimes, felt, con-
sciously or unconsciously, distressed by the role models provided by
commercials? How often have we chosen our clothing and appearance, at
least partly, based on the things we have seen in advertisements and on fash-
ion models? How many of us can really claim never to have been affected by
Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control ● 179
them? Even more important is the question regarding how we react when we
notice that we are not as beautiful, successful, rich, or capable as the role
models provided for us; are we disappointed, depressed, or even afraid of
becoming failed persons according to such social standards?
Nevertheless, there are some differences between propaganda posters and
today’s advertisements. The posters offered the only role model of that time
and everyone was required to adapt oneself to these models, going even as far
as imitating the dressing and hairstyle. Models and the socialist utopia were
meant to be real and realized by everyone; people really tried their best to imi-
tate what they saw in the posters. Nowadays at least, we know that the mod-
els and the illusionist world provided by advertisements are not real. Only a
few of us can imitate such models and, actually, we do not even have to.
Furthermore, today we also have more role models and lifestyles to choose
from provided by different media and ideologies.
From these arguments, I believe that the posters had a much stronger
effect on their audience than advertisements have today. As a side effect, they
also incited competition and frustration when people failed to meet the set
expectations. Therefore, I suggest that these posters depicting models that
can be seen as a government’s mental terror against its own people.
Artists
I suggest that the most influential way of using artwork to provoke terror
emerged when art was turned against artists by Party officials. Both art and
artists were strictly under the control of the CCP and, therefore, art that devi-
ated from the Party’s ideology was not possible to publish. After the begin-
ning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, all public artistic creation was
devoted to propaganda work. Often professional artists had to work collec-
tively in groups in order to submerge their individuality. Professional artists
were seen as a part of the elite and, for this reason, they could not be com-
pletely trusted. Instead the paintings made by peasants, who were often
taught by professionals, were highly appreciated. These “amateur painters”
were seen as a part of the masses and therefore depicting the true spirit of the
revolution (Cohen 1987, 21–22; Galikowski 1998, 78–114, 152–54).
Artworks were used, in turn, to control the artists who had created them.
They were studied carefully by officials, and were sometimes severely criti-
cized on seemingly unreasonable grounds. The artist could never be sure what
would be deemed rightist and why; no one knew where the limits were. A
work of art prized earlier could, after a few years, be interpreted as a “black
painting.” For example, in 1974, special exhibitions held in major cities put
180 ● Minna Valjakka
Scar Art
After Mao’s death in 1976, the situation of art and artists slowly changed.
Post-1976 art began gradually to portray the reality of the Cultural
Revolution. Reflections of traumatic experiences can be found especially in
literature but also in the visual arts, called scar art. This art was used to rewrite
the silent history and bring out the tragedies of individuals. As such, it can be
said to function as a healing method within the society. Scar art worked as a
means of self-reflection and aimed for collective purification (Köppel-Yang
2003, 84; Galikowski 1998, 193–99).
The real scenes of violent occurrences that scar art depicts emphasize the
unreality shown in posters. Simultaneously, they provide proof of the enor-
mous contradiction between art and reality during the previous decades.
Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control ● 181
Finally, artworks since the end of the 1970s portray the images that art from
the Cultural Revolution would have depicted if it had been allowed to reflect
society as it really was. Life was not that happy at all, but rather full of con-
tradictions, fear, and terror for many. Even the smallest suspicion of misbe-
havior could precipitate serious consequences. Furthermore, the propaganda
posters strengthened and multiplied these emotions by their omnipresence,
expression, and function.
A statement from Zhang Hongtu, a contemporary Chinese artist living
nowadays in New York, emphasizes the healing function of the post-1976 art.
He writes, “I found that all the young people, including myself, were all
fooled and used by Mao. . . . For me, Mao’s image was god-like in China.
What I have done is pull down this image from the pantheon to reality.
Working on Mao is one way to extricate myself from the nightmare; first I felt
sinful and fearful, now I feel nothing” (Zhang in Wu 2005, 46).
Conclusion
Obviously the main intention of art, and especially propaganda posters dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution, was to change the society, not to reflect it. Art in
different forms was the main medium for propagating the Party’s ideology. In
order to compel people to strive for a socialist utopia as a united front, posters
clearly stated acceptable behavior and political thinking through provision of
positive role models. In other words, posters created a strict form of social
behavior in presenting values and norms. Because the ideals were set by the
Chinese Communist Party, propaganda posters served, without question, as
tools of effective governmental control.
As discussed in this chapter, posters were used in different ways to create
confusion, anxiety, fear, frustration, distress, and even terror among people.
In their memoirs, people state that they were powerfully influenced and
manipulated by this propaganda (see, e.g., Jiang 1998, 265–67; Min 2003,
5). The creating, producing, and distribution of posters was strictly con-
trolled by the government, in order to systematically change the political
behavior and thinking of the masses. As such, propaganda posters fulfill the
following part of the definition of terrorism, stated earlier, “Threat- and vio-
lence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization),
(imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target
(audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a tar-
get of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propa-
ganda is primarily sought” (Schmid 1988, 28). In such a light, propaganda
posters during the Cultural Revolution can clearly be seen to have functioned
as part of a systematic program of governmental terror against its own people.
182 ● Minna Valjakka
References
Andrews, Julia F. 1994. Painters and politics in the People’s Republic of China,
1949–1979. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Benewick, Robert. 1999. Icons of power: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution.
In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural
Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 123–37. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Chang, Arnold. 1980. Painting in the People’s Republic of China: The politics of style.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
Chen, Xiaomei. 1999. Growing up with posters in the Maoist era. In Picturing power
in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans
and Stephanie Donald, 101–22. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Clunas, Craig. 1999. Souvenirs of Beijing: Authority and subjectivity in art historical
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Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 47–61. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Cohen, Joan Lebold. 1987. The new Chinese painting 1949–1986. New York: Harry
N. Abrams.
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(Gateway link to JSTOR article, accessed February 12, 2007).
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nuity. In Picturing power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural
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Duo, Duo. 2003. Looking at the propaganda posters. In Chinese propaganda posters,
ed. Anchee Min, Duo Duo, and Stefan R. Landsberger, 10–11. Köln: Taschen.
Evans, Harriet. 1999. Comrade sisters: Gendered bodies and spaces. In Picturing
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Evans and Stephanie Donald, 63–78. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Galikowski, Maria. 1998. Art and politics in China 1949–1984. Hong Kong: Chinese
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Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and
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Jiang, Ji-Li. 1998. Red scarf girl: A memoir of the Cultural Revolution. New York:
Collins.
Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control ● 183
Javier Franzé
Introduction
T
his chapter aims to analyze the problem of the relation between
ethics and politics as posed in the film The Sweet Hereafter, by Atom
Egoyan,2 rooted in the theories of Machiavelli and Weber on good
and evil in politics. It also looks to test these theories with the challenges
exposed in the film, and to see if the film can help expose the limits of this
reflection and suggest possible solutions. The Sweet Hereafter allows for reflec-
tion on the relation between ethics and politics because it raises the question
of how to understand the sense of community by questioning its future, as
seen generally through its children—the next generation of a town’s citizens.
The weave of this work is shaped by two sets of questions, which are
threaded throughout. On the one hand, where lies the good within the
quandary proposed by The Sweet Hereafter? Which is the good and ethically
desirable political solution? On the other hand, does tension really exist
between the good of the victims and the good of the community, as the char-
acter of Nicole proposes, or can both be brought into harmony with one
another, as the lawyer, Stephens, suggests? What are the consequences of not
investigating the truth? What does “saving the community” mean? Is it
enough to consider the consequences of the action itself in order to do good
in politics?
186 ● Javier Franzé
The Story
On the morning of December 6, 1995, the school bus that picks up the chil-
dren of Sam Dent, a small town in British Columbia, Canada, runs off the
road and slides over a frozen lake. The weight of the bus is too much for the
ice and ends up sinking into the freezing water. Fourteen of the twenty-one
children die, threatening to rob the town of its future. The driver, Dolores
Driscoll, who has been driving this route for the past fifteen years and who
has an especially close and loving relationship with the parents and chil-
dren—perhaps because she does not have her own children—survives the
accident. Nicole Burnell, one teenage survivor, ends up paralyzed. Her par-
ents, Sam and Mary, later play an integral part in the fight for justice and psy-
chological closure sought out by some of the victims’ parents.
Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, goes to the town to convince the grieving par-
ents to file a lawsuit. At first, he is not overly welcomed, in the midst of this
stressful and painful situation, but little by little, many families buy into his
proposal, like the Ottos and the Walkers, who both lost their only children,
and the aforementioned Burnells. Stephens promises to take a third of the
The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber ● 187
money awarded from the lawsuit only if they win. So either way, his services
will not cost the families anything.
However, Stephens does not convince everyone. Nicole, who ends up par-
alyzed from the waist down—and whose parents are the lawyer’s main
allies—and Billy Ansel, the town mechanic (widowed due to his wife’s fatal
cancer), who now loses both of his twins in the accident, head the group
opposed to the idea of the lawsuit. Ansel is sure that it was an accident. He
says that he himself had serviced the bus in his shop. Furthermore, he is the
only one who witnesses the accident. He was on his way to work that morn-
ing, as usual, driving his truck behind the school bus and waving to his chil-
dren who were sitting at the back of the bus.
The night before the accident, Nicole is babysitting Ansel’s children while
Ansel is with his lover, Risa Walker, in the motel she runs with her husband,
Wendell Walker, who has gone to see a hockey game. Nicole is reading The
Pied Piper of Hamelin to the children as a bedtime story. Ansel also gives
Nicole some of his deceased wife Lydia’s clothes. Nicole is wearing one of
these sweaters the next day, when the accident happens. That night, Nicole’s
father, Sam, picks her up from Billy’s house. As they arrive home, he leads her,
without a word, to the barn, which is lit with small candles. They have an
erotic encounter in this oneiric atmosphere.
The lawyer goes full force with the lawsuit: he convinces Nicole—with the
help of her parents—to testify last, and subpoenas Ansel to make a declara-
tion. Stephens’s lawsuit is not the only one, since the town is teeming with
lawyers and some families hire more than one. The legal processes multiply
and with these, so do the agreements and negotiations between the parties.
There are many scenes that exemplify the conflict between those for and
those against Stephens’s lawsuit: Nicole and her parents on the day she
returns from the hospital; Ansel and Nicole’s parents the day before she testi-
fies; Ansel and his lover, Risa Walker, who has also lost a son in the accident;
and finally, Ansel and the lawyer, Stephens, when he tries to convince Ansel
to join the lawsuit, after taking footage of the totaled bus.
The day of Nicole’s testimony finally arrives. Stephens has arranged for
Nicole to testify last, in order to favor his argument. Nicole had already
warned Stephens that she would not lie, that she would only tell the truth.
Stephens agrees with this. He expects her testimony to be brief and vague
since all throughout her recovery and up to that point she has claimed not to
remember much about the accident, and her doctors corroborate this.
However, to her father Sam and the lawyer’s surprise, Nicole claims on the
stand that she starts to remember things, and testifies that Dolores was dri-
ving very fast that day. She claims to be sure of this because she could see the
188 ● Javier Franzé
speedometer from the first seat on the bus, where she always sat. She says that
it was up to seventy-two miles per hour, but that there was no time for warn-
ing since the accident happened so fast. Her declaration ruins Stephens’s
strategy and it destroys his lawsuit, which is based on the idea that everything
was due to negligence on behalf of the bus manufacturer, the local or state
government, as well as all of the other existing lawsuits in town.
With her testimony almost over, and in the midst of Stephens and Sam’s
stupor, Nicole’s voice can be heard in a voice-over—paraphrasing The Pied
Piper of Hamelin—admitting that she has lied, but from this lie has come a
(new) truth. The scene changes to November 22, 1997, two years after the
event. Stephens sees Dolores in an airport, supposedly not far from Sam
Dent. Dolores now drives a hotel bus. She seems to have recovered the hap-
piness that characterized her before the accident. Nicole’s voice narrating,
continuing the story from before, asks if Stephens understands that now,
everyone in the town, including Dolores and the children who died, have
become citizens of a new town, with its own rules, and it lives in the sweet
hereafter, a strange and new place.
justice system are not always useful means for attaining the end of saving the
community, since they can also destroy it: the mobilization of those affected
can be good for finding the truth, but it is precisely because of this that it can
be harmful to coexistence. The process of searching for the truth—the inves-
tigation prior to clarification—with the multiplying lawsuits and the crossing
accusations that come with them may destroy coexistence by undermining
the mutual trust and appreciation between the members of the community.
For Nicole and Ansel, coexistence is above the truth or above the pernicious
effects of the search for it. This is why they trust in the conscience of the indi-
vidual or of the community to avoid the repetition of such a tragedy. In short,
this side believes that the truth about the accident is most probably harmful
for the future of the community; it subordinates the past and even the pre-
sent, to the future: in order to move forward, one must forget some things.
(b) The specific nature of politics, due to the ends it strives for, the place
where it searches to attain them (the world in which it works) and the specific
instrument with which it searches. Indeed, politics is an earthly activity,
which searches for ends in this world. The world does not have an inherent
sense, nor is this sense moral. Therefore, the results of an action are not deter-
mined by its moral content, rather, for purely factual reasons, among which
strength is often paramount, but also includes prestige, legitimacy, perception
of those involved, etc. The relation between good and evil is paradoxical.
Machiavelli calls this fortuna5; Weber calls it the Ethical Irrationality of the
World (Weber 1997a, 122–23). Weber delves deeper into this point than
Machiavelli, as he declares that values cannot be understood scientifically, but
rather that they are an act of faith. Science can only aid in the decision mak-
ing by clarifying thought: it helps to analyze the consistency, coherency, and
efficiency of the decision in terms of the values that it claims to be aiming to
defend. Therefore, there is no moral objective truth, but rather, the world is
inevitably open to the fight for values (Weber 1997b, 147–48). Moreover, the
good that politics pursues is a common earthly good, not an individual one.
These two goods can be contradictory, precisely because the world is a factual
reality and not a moral one: in this case, in politics, common good must be
chosen over individual good. Furthermore, this is what makes someone into
an upstanding politician/citizen. Being a good individual is not the same as
being a good citizen/politician. Saving one’s soul is not the same as saving the
city. Governing a community is not the same as governing oneself (Berlin
1981, 64). Weber adds one more detail: the way in which politics ensures the
fulfillment of common ends is through violence. In other words, what char-
acterizes the modern state is the monopoly of legitimate violence. This, along
with the ethical irrationality of the world, makes the ethics of politics one of
responsibility, based on the consideration of the consequences of the actions
taken to achieve the ends themselves, and not one of conviction, based on the
unconditional defense of one’s own values, which are seen as absolute truths.
The ethics of conviction is unpolitical because it is not able to see the para-
doxical relation between good and evil. It does not perceive the world as a fac-
tual reality, not moral; therefore, within it, there lies the possibility that an
action inspired by a value that is considered good by its bearer brings about
bad consequences for this value and for its bearer. Good can beget evil.
(c) Given these characteristics of politics (ethical irrationality of the world
or fortuna, preeminence of the common good, politics as an earthly activity,
political power based on violence), acting ethically consists in calculating the
probability of the consequences of one’s actions, not the good or bad charac-
ter of the values that guide the action, as well as in being willing to do evil in
order to achieve good, if it is necessary. Given the hegemony of classical
The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber ● 191
ethics, the latter usually manifests in two forms: as an acceptance of the fact
that even the values considered good must be mixed with violence—viewed
as an evil by classical ethics—in which politics is based, in order to be ful-
filled; and as a necessity for making a choice between the common good and
the individual good. In politics, the common good is considered over the
individual good because its logic is the defense of the community’s interests;
he or she who practices politics makes decisions that effect third parties, thus,
is obligated to consider these third parties over himself; and, finally, there is
no individual good outside of the common good: it is a requisite of this.
Because of this, when given the choice between saving one’s own soul and
saving the city, the politician must choose the second at the cost of the first.
Lastly, acting ethically consists in doing evil well: doing the least possible evil
in order to be effective. This is only done out of necessity (indicated by the
calculation of probabilities), not out of conviction. Doing evil well implies a
certain amount of lesser evil, which is derived from doing evil poorly.
(d) The criteria of ethical action in politics being that lesser evils avoid
greater evils, and not, as usually said in reference to Machiavelli, that the end
justifies the means.6 The difference between both criteria lies in the fact that
the latter does not condemn evil means, but rather it legitimates these means
in virtue of the value of the end. On the contrary, he who is guided by the cri-
teria that avoids greater evils by choosing lesser evils ethically condemns evil
means and only legitimates it in accordance with political logic as such.
The Position of Mitchell Stephens and the Families that Follow Him
This position is closer to classical ethics because within it, the world appears
as a rationalized place, which determines the trust in the success of what is
considered moral (in this case, the truth of the matter) and certainty that the
192 ● Javier Franzé
gratuitous and meaningless cannot happen. The latter can be seen in how
Stephens, before knowing anything about the situation, starts with the idea
that accidents never happen and he has no doubt that the truth will keep the
tragedy from being repeated.
Not accepting the possibility of an irrational world in ethical terms is also
seen in Risa Walker, one of Stephens’s supporters. She tells Billy Ansel in the
motel that “she needs to believe” that something caused the accident, be it the
guardrail, or Lydia’s sweater—Ansel’s dead wife’s—that Nicole wore on the
day of the accident. Ansel responded to her by saying that he did not need to
believe in anything, “It sounds like you’re looking for a witch doctor, not a
lawyer. Maybe they’re the same thing.”
Also, from this point of view, the common good is considered to be the
sum of individual goods, without thinking that there could be any contra-
diction between two ends that are considered as being good. This is seen in
how the avoidance of tragedy is expressed in more personal terms rather than
communal terms: what they are trying to avoid is that someone loses a child
again, not that the community ends up without a future.
Nicole’s parents’ conduct is thereby driven by the preeminence of the indi-
vidual over that which is communal. They support Stephens’s lawsuit because
they are primarily thinking about obtaining compensation money for their
daughter’s treatment. Ansel even offers them, in exchange for dropping the
lawsuit, the money he has received from his twin’s insurance. “That’s what we
used to do, remember? Help each other,” says Billy, “This was a community.”
The Burnells do not accept Ansel’s altruistic offer, and when he warns them
that the community is about to self-destruct due to the increasing lawsuits,
both Sam and Mary respond, “Stay out of it.” They believe that it would be
best if everyone moved on. They say, “We’re getting on with our lives, Billy.
Maybe it’s time you got on with yours,” as they have done, without consider-
ing the fact that there is nothing personal left for Ansel—now a widower,
without children, and with his relationship with Risa now over, due to being
opposed to one another on the matter of the accident.
In short, from this viewpoint, the future and the community do not exist
without a refined moral responsibility and the attempt to avoid that a tragedy
of this nature is repeated. The future of the community appears as a logical,
almost mechanical result of these two conditions. It is not so much that the
consequences are not thought about, but how they are thought about: not
contradictory nor paradoxical, not problematic, merging what is (facts) and
what ought to be (values). This way of representing the problem impedes their
considering the possible contradictions between truth and good, or between
truth and community.
The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber ● 193
reveal who it was that did not do their job,” he repeats to his Sam Dent
clients, referring to the bus. “The word (accident) doesn’t mean anything to
me,” he concludes. Stephens has experienced the ethical irrationality of the
world—in his daughter’s life, that is, going toward the future. But he does not
seem to have assimilated nor assumed it, even despite having been willing to
be guided by it.
Other traces of political ethics in Stephens are seen in that the target of his
lawsuit is not a person (Dolores), but rather, determined institutions (the city,
the school, the bus manufacturer). It can be seen also, in that his position
could, despite the ethical rationality around it, be based on a greater trust
than that of Nicole’s, for example, in the strength of the community itself to
restructure and reorganize its existence. This reorganization, however, is not
thought of as a communal act, but rather as the fruit of the sum of individual
acts; it is thought of, fundamentally, as the restitution of the sense of duty in
the people of Sam Dent.
a foreigner who looks to redeem himself for his personal problems at the cost
of Sam Dent (as could be the case of Stephens himself ). The salvation of the
community that Nicole undertakes demands the sacrifice of an important
part of the common good, symbolized by the character of Dolores.
Indeed, the salvation of the community supposes community life without
Dolores,7 without suffering, but also without her person, which is an impos-
sibility—her absence is painful. This fully represents the contradiction between
the common good and a part of this same good that jeopardizes the act itself
of saving the community. At the end of the film, when Nicole asks if Stephens
understands that now all the townspeople, including Dolores and the chil-
dren who have died, form a new community, she looks to solve this ethical-
political problem by means of a concept of community that reminds us of
that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, an alliance
between ancestors, the living and those to come.
Including all those who have formed part of the community within this is
equivalent to eluding its partial, polysemic, metonymic character. Indeed,
“community” and “saving the community” would form part of those con-
cepts that, like town, nation, identity, or state, cannot be perceived if not
through the rhetorical figures that name them. The central figure in political
language, that of political science as well as that of political activity as such, is
metonymy, that is to say, taking the part for the whole (Hammar 2005,
23–32). The inevitability of taking the part for the whole and, at the same
time, how this figure theoretically limits thought, in this case, on the relation
between ethics and politics, is also brought about another way. In fact, if we
start with Machiavellian and Weberian concepts, such as fortuna or the
Ethical Irrationality of the World—viewing the world as a factual reality and
not as essentially moral, without a given inherent sense, but rather one that
must be created by and given by man—then the inevitable result is that of
pluralism. This includes the meaning of the concepts of “community” and
“saving the community.” Therefore, they find themselves condemned to
being one part, one particularity, which names the whole. The whole is
unnamable as such, or it is provided that it is not a whole. These concepts,
then, do not seem to be involved in controversy and in the fight for meaning
only because there are opposite concepts put forth, in logical tension with
them, like saving one’s soul, but rather because they are also challenged by
other meanings of community and saving the community.
Eluding the metonymic character of the concept of community entails
setting aside the necessarily decisionist8 element present within its definition.
It presents the plurality of meanings as harmonizable, reducing the polemic
to mere deliberation, with which all transformation remains reabsorbed in
200 ● Javier Franzé
National Socialism was not having thought out the German army’s real pos-
sibilities of triumph when invading the Soviet Union.
Weber does not consider it valid to base the ethical-political rejection of
an action on the content of the value that guides it, since for him, it is not
possible to scientifically prove it demonstrative that a value is good or evil. It
is true that it is impossible to scientifically base values, nevertheless this does
not necessarily imply that we cannot say anything or that we must only speak
in terms of formal ethics, that is, circumscribed to the consequences of the
action. Furthermore, the ethical-political criteria itself of responsibility and of
the lesser evil/greater evil would require that we add to this the argument on
which values are ethical for our political action. Because only by constructing
a hierarchical table of values, although unfounded, relative and conditional,
is it possible to evaluate which evil is lesser and which evil is greater in every
circumstance and context of action.
The argument about values is key in Weber’s reflection, precisely because
they are unfounded (the fight for values channeled through a plebiscitary
leader democracy). However, the choice or preference of values as well as the
public argument around them represent a moment of freedom and individu-
alization of the subjects, not a space for scientific reflection. In other words,
what predominates in such a context is faith and belief, not a demonstrative
and conclusive rationality. Therefore, this fight is eternal and irresolvable.
Weber, in short, looks to establish political ethics on science, identified
with true knowledge. This brings him, insofar as part of the scientifically
unfounded character of values, to delimit political ethics to a sense of respon-
sibility with respect to the consequences of the actions for the value that
guides them without considering the value for which one is responsible.
Therein lies the achievements and the limits, the necessary, yet, at the same
time, insufficient character of his reflection. In the film, perhaps Stephens’s
position is defensible. What is not, however, is the way he does it. On the
contrary, Nicole’s position may not be defensible, but the way she does it is.
Conclusion
At the end of this journey, through the relation between ethics and politics, it
is possible to extract some conclusions. Indeed, (1) political ethics, according
to Machiavelli and Weber, is necessary but insufficient. It is necessary because
it more effectively grasps what type of good is distinctive to politics, what the
world in which politics takes place is like, and what politics as an activity and
as knowledge entails. It is insufficient because it does not consider some prob-
lems that arise from the relation between the traits that political ethics itself
202 ● Javier Franzé
has been able to identify as political characteristics, (a) the relation between
the common good, pluralism, and world: the question of the definition of the
sense of “saving the community”; and (b) the relation between values, the
world, and politics: the problem of the ethics of responsibility.
Moreover, (2) in order to be coherent with that which has been affirmed
in the first point, it must be shown that the insufficiencies emphasized here
are posed in the field of political ethics, not classical ethics. Regarding point
(a), it is possible to uphold that if we start with the idea that in politics, the
search for the common good prevails in a world void of inherent sense and
characterized by the plurality of values that are not objective, then the defin-
ition of common good cannot but form part of the fight for values as well.
The fight, and its consequent ethical-political tension in terms of physical
and symbolic violence, is not only apparent between the common good and
the private individual good, but also between different common goods. Here
one of the premises of the factual vision of the world that pluralism poses is
fulfilled: good things can be contradictory. Regarding point (b), it can be
affirmed that circumscribing ethical criteria of action to the evaluation of the
formal responsibility of the bearer with respect to his cause, obliges us to for-
mulate ethical-political judgments that are intuitively absurd; for example,
considering the responsible pursuit of the extermination of one community by
another to be ethical.
Finally, (3) the political ethics of Machiavelli and Weber has been prolific
and consistent, mainly in its dispute with classical ethics. In this sense, it was
and still is theoretically necessary, even while classical ethics continues to
carry important weight when viewing the world and politics. It has allowed
for the axis of the debate to change in order to lay the foundations for the
political debate on ethics by opposing the individual internal idea of the sal-
vation of the soul, the collective idea of the salvation of the community, and
the rules of a world given an inherent and ethically rational sense. This is a
clinical vision according to which the world is a factual reality devoid of
inherent ethical sense.
Nevertheless, the construction of political ethics is not resolved once the
polemic with classical ethics has been clarified. Not all of its problems can be
posed in terms of the collective/individual ethics dichotomy, but rather oth-
ers appear within collective or political ethics themselves. Both Machiavelli
and Weber reflected on political ethics in an intellectual context marked by
the hegemony of classical ethics. Perhaps this is why their main effort was
focused on strongly affirming the central pillars of these ethics. That, and cer-
tain traits common to both thinkers in terms of nationalism, statism, and the
identifying of politics with personal leadership, as well as Weber’s tendency to
The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber ● 203
take his concept of ethics only as far as science would allow, could be among
the determining factors that (respectively) minimized the issue posed inside
political ethics. This is precisely due to the extremely prolific path they paved.
From this, it can also be derived—and is worth insisting on—that the insuf-
ficiencies of political ethics do not have as much to do with the challenges
that classical ethics presents, but more so with those that appear once one
thinks in terms of political ethics.
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Notes
1. Translated by Victoria Fontana. I would like to thank Benjamin Arditi and
Naomi Sussmann for helpful comments on this chapter.
2. The Sweet Hereafter by Atom Egoyan (director, producer, screenplay), 1997.
Canada, 112 minutes. Based on the novel by Russell Banks. More information
at http://www.egofilmarts.com and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120255/
fullcredits#cast (accessed March 23, 2007).
3. Loosely taken here from the concept of horror-art by Carroll (1990, chap. 1).
204 ● Javier Franzé
4. The characterization that Isaiah Berlin (1981, 25–79) made is used in order to
make this distinction. The central notion Machiavelli distinguishes is upheld,
not between ethics and politics, but between political ethics and ethics that are
inappropriate for politics. The difference for Berlin lies in the fact that he iden-
tifies this other nonpolitical ethics with “Judeo-Christian ethics,” while in this
work it is preferable, according to Skinner (2000, 35–47), to say “classical
ethics.” Classical ethics can be understood as that which was elaborated
throughout different historical eras from the reflections of Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Stoicism, Cicero, and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
5. Machiavelli 1969a, XXV. On the paradoxical relation between good and evil in
politics, see: Machiavelli 1969b, I, 9; II, 8, 14. On the difference between the
concept of Fortuna used by Machiavelli and that of Christianity, see Skinner
2000, 26–31.
6. Isaiah Berlin (1981, 62, 64) defines Machiavelli’s ethical-political criteria as “the
end ‘excuses’ the means” and in terms of lesser evils avoid greater evils (“The
qualities of the lion and the fox are not in themselves morally admirable, but if
a combination of these qualities will alone preserve the city from destruction,
then these are the qualities that leaders must cultivate,” 51). We believe that
both criteria involve different concepts as a prudent ethical-political rule. The
decisive factor is that “the end ‘excuses’ the means” would be the traditional
vision of Machiavelli as “Machiavellian” or “master of evil” (see Strauss 1995),
although Berlin does not use it in this sense. Indeed, the evaluation of lesser
evils and greater evils would be more representative of that which Berlin himself
presents. For a discussion on this point in Berlin, see Franzé 2003, 63–76.
7. “Dolores,” female proper name derived from the singular Latin word “dolor,”
meaning, “sorrow/pain.”
8. In the sense of Carl Schmitt, as a decision “that emanates from nothingness”
(1985, 32).
PART 4
I
t was 1971 when Hannah Arendt first published in the New York Review
of Books her essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers”
(Arendt, in Arendt 1972, 3–47). The essay commented on the recent
publication of the forty-seven-volume “History of U.S. Decision Making
Process on Vietnam Policy” (commissioned by Secretary of State Robert S.
McNamara in June 1967 and completed a year and a half later). The scandal
at the core of the publication of this report had to do with the fact that it was
not meant to be published, at least not in the way that the New York Times
(NYT) got hold of it. The above report became widely known as the
Pentagon Papers and was, in fact, a “top-secret, richly documented record of
the American role in Indochina from World War II to May 1968” (Arendt
1972, 3). The embarrassment of the Nixon administration—which, shortly
thereafter, had to deal with another, more infamous scandal—in receiving the
news that the public had become informed of the years of lies and deception
in Vietnam was observable in its futile attempt to silence Daniel Ellsberg (the
Pentagon “expert” and member of the Rand Corporation who was responsi-
ble for leaking the report to the New York Times). The NYT scoop of the
Pentagon Papers preceded the Washington Post revelations on the Watergate
Building infraction, with the consequences that we are all familiar with.
Those were the days, we could say, when the revelation of a scandal mattered,
when public opinion was still receptive, aware, and able to respond and react
to lying, deception, and misconduct of those in power.
But what did these forty-seven volumes tell the American public?
Surprisingly, they did not reveal any hidden information, any secret complot,
208 ● Olivia Guaraldo
anything that was not already known to the majority of the citizens. As in fact
Arendt herself notes, the report “contains nothing to support the theory of
grandiose imperialist stratagems,” and again, the “Pentagon Papers revealed
little significant news that was not available to the average reader of dailies
and weeklies” (Arendt 1972, 45). One of the moral qualities of the report
consisted instead in the will of the so-called Pentagon experts to produce an
impartial self-examination and an objective analysis of their deeds. These
experts or “problem solvers”—who were asked to evaluate the policies they
had been proposing and implementing—had been “drawn into government
from the universities and the various think tanks” (9–10), they were men of
science, learned experts “in love with theory.” One of their main peculiarities,
in fact, was their reliance on game theories and system analyses, and they
were “eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudomathematical
language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality
presented them” (11).
What was at the core of the scandal, according to Arendt—who reports
the words of Daniel Ellsberg, “How could they?”—was the systematic denial,
on the experts’ side, of factual reality as it came to them from intelligence
information. The lying that was to be found at the foundation of the U.S.
Vietnam policy did not consist in hiding some secret plans from the
American public, but in neglecting substantial factual information, in pre-
tending that theory could prevail over facts. In order to remain consistent
with their theories—based on mathematical calculations, game theories, and
other abstract criteria—the problem solvers neglected simple and solid facts.
For example, they neglected the absence of any connection between China
and the Soviet Union (which would have been a justification for the Vietnam
War as a containment of China, and a proof of the existence of a solid and
consistent Communist block). In addition, they also neglected the absence of
any strategic interest in “liberating Vietnam” from the “Communist menace”
(intelligence reports told President Johnson in 1964 “with the possible excep-
tion of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly suc-
cumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam”).
Further along these lines, the “global” provenance of the South-Vietnamese
insurgency—another justification for the war as being “imported” to South
Vietnam by foreign communists—had been dismissed by the CIA, which
reported in 1961 and in 1963 that “the primary sources of Communist
strength in South Vietnam are indigenous” (Arendt 1972, 25, quoting the
Papers).
The Violence of Lying ● 209
Domesticating Dissent
Yet there are compelling differences between past and present situations, and,
historically speaking, today’s ideological impetus is essentially different from
the ideologies and theories that informed the Washington administration at
the time of the Vietnam War. “The problem solvers did not judge, they cal-
culated” (1972, 37), says Arendt, but what made their calculations differ
from the ideological purports of today’s neoconservative ideology is essen-
tially this: the former relied on the evidence of mathematical, purely rational
truth while the latter has transformed the rational choice argument into a
religious, moral one. Truth no longer reveals itself as a mathematical formula
but through moral statements, blatantly colored with vague religious under-
tones.4 The fabrication of reality relies upon unverifiable truths, and this is
why perhaps today, differently from the times of the Vietnam War, the
importance of facts, and their acknowledgment, does not play any major
political role. The pathology of contemporary political lies no longer depends
on simple logical reasoning, violently applied to reality, but on the combina-
tion of moral, religious premises and instrumental, cause-effect system analy-
ses. The fictions become more powerful in the face of the religious premises
on which they are construed.
Moreover, the principles of Western democracies, virtuously embodied by
American democracy, become matters of faith; they undergo, so to speak,
some sort of essentialization: the expansion of democracy, the liberation of
Islamic women, the infinite detention of suspects at Guantanamo. All these
instances are examples of a religious belief in American, Western values, and
a subsequent criminalization of those who do not comply with them.
Democracy transformed into a religion still implies a secular use of its imple-
ments of violence: both symbolic and material. Therefore, in spite of the reli-
gious rhetoric of its leaders, Western politics continues to act according to its
essentially modern structures. In the current global disorder of violence, state
sovereignty has not renounced the secular premises on which it was founded:
the monopoly on violence, the final decision on the state of exception, the
claim to legitimate authority. To what extent these premises can still function
and produce order—as in modernity—is easily discernible. (On this, see
Guaraldo, forthcoming.)
One further significant difference, in fact, and perhaps the most telling,
has to do with the way in which public opinion has become—so to speak—
domesticated, ceasing to exercise a significant role. Public opinion has pro-
gressively become a passive subject, unable to become outraged, even after the
evident lies have been revealed. It is as if today, differently from then, we were
witnessing a much more efficacious and successful fictional construction able
The Violence of Lying ● 217
sentences aimed at rendering the Iraqi conflict—a war that was tremendously
lacking in juridical, political, and strategic legitimation—spectacular, excit-
ing, and above all media-friendly, or, to put it differently, entertainment-ori-
ented. One might dare to say that Madison Avenue’s manipulative techniques
have been replaced by those of Hollywood, insofar as it is to the cinemato-
graphic imagery that today’s propaganda refers, in order to entertain the pub-
lic, which hardly has other parameters to refer to. Every mission is a Mission
Impossible, every soldier a Private Ryan, every pilot a Top Gun, every enemy
a dark-skinned, less-than human being with no face and no name.
The relationship between politics and fiction seems to have reached a level
Arendt could have not imagined, since she knew little or nothing of the pow-
erful effects of spectacularized politics and violence. It is not by chance that
such spectacularization has been initiated by the media-event par excellence,
namely the Twin Towers terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, a decisive
threshold between an obsolete Realpolitik and a new, unreal Fiktionpolitik. A
politics based on the systematic abuse of fictions, which opens the way to the
ecstatic fulfillment of the “clash of civilization” prophecy. The fact that such
prophecy is based upon a fiction that is as vague (and vast) as it is appealing
makes it readily disposable for ideological ends; but thanks to the spectacu-
larized means of both terrorist and “legitimate” violence makes it also plausi-
ble. The ideological fiction—the clash of civilizations—becomes real by
virtue of the violence that performs it, making it happen.
insignificant and superfluous given” (2005, 191). The famous zoon politikon,
as Arendt claims, is founded on a clamorous falsification of the plural and
antihierarchical matrix of politics. In fact, the given that “Man” stands for and
therefore neutralizes the plurality of human beings, necessarily implies that
he cannot be political since, in this horizon, there is no plurality and thus no
relation. In the economy of the One—a mirror image of the economy of the
Same—there is no in between, no common space to share. Thus, “what the
Western tradition calls politics is in reality a model of de-politicization that
excludes the plural and relational foundation of politics” (Cavarero 2005,
191). Arendt tried, during her lifetime, to go beyond this fictitious entity of
man in the singular, attempting a phenomenology of the human, which is
rooted in a plural context. Plurality, she affirms, is “the law of the earth.”
Such a condition of plurality has to do with the fact that we all come to life
as unique beings and have the possibility to realize such uniqueness only in
the political sphere. She attempts, in other words, to abandon the political
fictive entity of man, the individual, the subject—whose tradition, she claims,
is not immune from ambiguous involvement in totalitarian regimes—and
come closer, so to speak, to a concrete condition in which humans do come
to life as distinct from one another, unrepeatable, irreplaceable, unique. But
for this uniqueness to be recognized, each human being needs, in order to
exist, the presence of others. Plurality therefore is the name given to irre-
ducible differences that qualify each human being, who is at the same time
undeniably related to others. Politics is the relational sphere in which such
plurality can become manifest.
Recently, there has been an interesting, albeit not openly Arendtian, refor-
mulation of these themes carried out by Judith Butler, who, in her recent
book Precarious Life (Butler 2004), has reflected upon the political impact of
mourning and loss in the United States after September 11. In her book, she
affirms that the shock of the terrorist attack should have been an occasion for
the United States to reflect not only upon the effects of their foreign policy,
but also upon the loss of their “First World privilege,” namely the privilege
of perceiving themselves as secure, safe, prosperous, and in charge of their
own destiny:
To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out
the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable
borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If
national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at
all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political
dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary,
offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be
220 ● Olivia Guaraldo
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
———. 1972. Crises of the republic. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich.
———. 1972. Lying in politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers. Revised and
extended version in Crises of the republic, by Hannah Arendt, 3–47. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich.
———. 1968. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York:
Viking.
———. 1951/1966. The origins of totalitarianism. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence. London:
Verso.
Butler, Judith, and Adriana Cavarero. 2005. Condizione umana contro “natura.”
Micromega 9: 25–35.
Dean, Jodi. 2005. Evil’s political habitat. Redescriptions 9: 51–79.
Disch, Lisa Jane. 1994. Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press.
Guaraldo, Olivia. 2001. Storylines. Politics, history and narrative from an Arendtian
perspective. Jyväskylä: SoPhi Academic Books.
———. n.d. Disobedient state and faithful citizen: Re-locating politics in the age of
globalization. In The Ashgate research companion to democratisation in Europe
(Politics, concepts and histories), ed. K. Palonen, T. Pulkkinen, and J. M. Rosales.
London: Ashgate.
Klein, Naomi. 2004. The year of the fake. Nation, January 26, http://www.thenation
.com/doc/20040126/klein.
Mann, Bonnie. 2006. How America justifies its war: A modern/postmodern aesthet-
ics of masculinity and sovereignty. Hypathia 21 (4): 147–63.
222 ● Olivia Guaraldo
Notes
1. For a compelling analysis of the “war on terror” as characterized by a “masculine
postmodern aesthetics,” see the article by Bonnie Mann, “How America
Justifies its War: A Modern/Postmodern Aesthetics of Masculinity and
Sovereignty” (2006).
2. In an article, “The Year of the Fake,” which appeared in the Nation on January
26, 2004, Naomi Klein highlights how the phobia for facts has reached an
almost comical level of absurdity. According to an FBI alert, reports Klein,
police patrols—while carrying out routine investigations on drivers pulled over
for traffic violations—were asked to keep their eyes open for people carrying
almanacs around with them. Klein writes, “Why almanacs? Because they are
filled with facts . . . [a]nd according to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin, facts are
dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists, which can use them to ‘assist with
target selection and preoperational planning’” (2004). Klein concedes that “the
blacklisting of almanacs was a fitting end for 2003, a year that waged open war
on truth and facts and celebrated forgeries of all kinds. This was the year when
fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier
declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey.” What we are
dealing with is no longer a political use of lying, nor the imaginative use of fic-
tion in order to change reality, but a systematic abuse of fiction, which becomes,
eventually, a farce, and it is not by chance that Klein uses the word “fake.” Klein
concludes, “I’m no longer convinced that America can be set free by truth alone.
In many cases, fake versions of events have prevailed even when the truth was
readily available. . . . Bush is actively remaking America in the image of his own
ignorance and duplicity. Not only is it OK to be misinformed, but as the
almanac warning shows, knowing stuff is fast becoming a crime” (2004).
3. See, for a detailed analysis of public understanding of the invasion of Iraq, Lee
Salter, who, in a paper on the BBC representation of the war, reports some
interesting data. He writes that tenuous—and unlikely—links between the
Iraqi government and al Qaeda asserted by the U.S. government must have con-
tributed to some “70% of Americans believing, against ‘factual truth’, that the
Iraqi government had something to do with the terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington in September 2001 (Washington Post, 6 September 2003: p.
A01). Even by 2005 47% of Americans believed that former President Hussein
‘helped plan and support the hijackers’ [Harris Poll #14, 18 February 2005],
which was largely inferred in President Bush’s speeches [Christian Science
The Violence of Lying ● 223
Monitor, 14 March 2003].” I would like to thank Lee Salter for having provided
me with the unpublished manuscript of this article.
4. On the political use of the term “evil” in presidential discourses from F. D.
Roosevelt to George W. Bush, and its progressively moral and religious connec-
tions, as well as vagueness, see the article “Evil’s Political Habitat,” by Jodi Dean
(2005, especially 69–75).
5. For a relatively critical assessment on the relationship between war and public
opinion in the United States during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, see
John Mueller (2005).
CHAPTER 12
Terrorized by Sound?
Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art
Lauri Siisiäinen
Introduction
T
his chapter focuses on Michel Foucault’s late studies (in the early
eighties, until his death), on issues of the art of living (tekhnē tou
biou, un art de vivre) and aesthetics of existence (l’esthétique de l’exis-
tence). I intend to show how, in these studies, the issues of terror and fear—as
well as their “opposite pole,” courage and audacity—occupy a central political
significance for Foucault.
My aim here is not to evaluate the accuracy of Foucault’s reading of the
corpus of late ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, above all Stoic, Cynic and
Epicurean.1 My aim here is, rather, to show firstly how Foucault, using the
corpus of late ancient philosophy, presents an interesting conception on the
significance of terror and fear as the adversary (if not the most central adver-
sary) of the ethics and aesthetics of existence, and thus as central targets of
resistance and struggle. Fear and terror become, in this manner, an urgent
political issue, a relevant one also in Foucault’s own contemporary situation.
Secondly, I attempt to show that—surprisingly, perhaps, and contrary to the
established picture of Foucault as a thinker not much interested in issues of
“sensory difference”—he tackles, in this context, the question concerning the
particular significance of sound, voice, sonority, audition, and auditory effects,
that is, sonorous art. What is emphasized as well is the relation of these to logos
(discourse, speech, linguistic signification, etc.), their position in relation to
the ethics and aesthetics of existence and, finally, also their relation to fear
and terror.
226 ● Lauri Siisiäinen
Consequently, the art of living and care of the self—in order to protect the
liberty—imply, or better yet, become inseparable from a continuous and
irreconcilable struggle (une lutte) of the subject against becoming intruded,
permeated, and overpowered by various actions or events, whether in positive
or negative manner (Foucault 2001a, 230, 306–8, 405).
To protect our liberty, we need to perform specific sorts of activities, with
their own arts, techniques, and equipment. Foucault believes that we need
philosophical discourse or logos, precisely as such equipment of protection and
preparation (paraskeuē). What this discursive protection/preparation does is
nothing less than make us sufficiently armed, in order to win the constant
struggle against the threats to liberty, to make possible our successful resis-
tance against our being influenced, affected, and overpowered (Foucault
2001, 230). With this agonistic character of philosophical discourse (and
philosophical art of living as such) in mind, Foucault can call the person
engaged in this discourse the athlete of the ancient spirituality, one who is con-
stantly engaged in “a struggle (une lutte), struggle in which his adversary is all
that may emerge from the exterior world: the event (l’événement). The
ancient athlete is an athlete of the event” (Foucault 2001a, 306–8; emphasis
added). In this struggle, so it seems, there is no other sort of equipment that
can really help us (at least not one mentioned by Foucault), except logos, that
is, the practice of philosophical discourse.
Without this discursive equipment at one’s disposal, the human being
remains vulnerable, unprotected, and unprepared in the face of the affective,
intrusive, and overpowering tendency of events. It is now that we explicitly
come back to the issue of terror and fear. Namely, Foucault mentions the
events of hardship, suffering, lack and loss (together with their counterpart,
pleasure and gratification), as forming the most serious threat—as well as the
“test”—to ethical-aesthetical liberty. As a result, the preparation for these
kinds of events, for our confrontation with them, needs special attention and
effort. The discursive equipment mentioned are, perhaps more than anything
else, needed to protect our liberty, our basic ethical-aesthetical self-mastery,
from becoming affected, intruded, permeated, troubled, overwhelmed, and
overpowered by hardships and sufferings:
This human being does not have at his disposal the discourse-aid (le discours-
secours), the discourse-recourse (le discours-recours), which would allow him
to react as he must, not to let himself be troubled, to remain master of himself.
And, in default of this equipment, he is going to be in a way amenable to the
event (perméable à l’événement). This event is going to enter into his soul (va
entrer dans son âme), troubling it (la troubler), affecting it (l’affecter), etc.
Hence, he will find himself in a state of passivity (en état de passivité) in
Terrorized by Sound? ● 229
respect to this event. So, one must prepare oneself for the events that arrive,
one must prepare oneself for the hardships (se préparer aux maux). (Foucault
2001a, 450)
As it turns out, the actual threat to the freedom or liberty of the ethical-
aesthetical activity is to be found in our confrontation with events of hardship,
in accidents of various kinds, and in our reaction to these. To prevent our
becoming seized and overwhelmed, it is necessary to prepare ourselves with
discursive equipment. And, if we want to find names for these states of pas-
sivity and nonfreedom, in which the subject becomes intruded on by hard-
ship, these are nothing other than fear and terror. In the last instance, the real
and most serious adversaries of liberty, and of the possibilities of ethics and
aesthetics, are fear and terror. In the last instance, the discursive equipment
(logos, philosophical truth and knowledge) of preparation are indispensable
because they offer us protection by overcoming and doing away with fear
and terror. Foucault writes, “It would be the knowledge of nature, of phu-
sis . . . also in so far as it is susceptible of transforming the subject (de trans-
former le sujet) (who was, in face of nature, in face of what one had been
taught about the Gods and the things of the world, totally filled with fears
and terrors [tout rempli de craintes et de terreurs]) into a free subject (en un sujet
libre), a subject who will discover in himself the possibility and resource of
his inalterable and perfectly tranquil pleasure” (Foucault 2001a, 231;
emphasis added).
Foucault does indeed tackle the question about auditory perception and
sound in this context. This may appear surprising, though, as in general
Foucault is not perhaps portrayed as a thinker who would really have been
interested in this sort of thing.
When it comes to reading Foucault’s late studies on the art of living, on
aesthetics and the ethics of existence, the importance of discursive practices,
techniques, and equipment has been duly noticed. However, the issue of dif-
ferent “materialities” of media, the body of discourse (so to speak), and the
related different perceptual/sensory qualities (visual, auditory, etc.), and the dis-
tinctive arts and techniques of sensory effects, has not really been pondered in
this context. Perhaps it has been assumed that what actually matters for
Foucault in his discussion on the techniques, practices, and equipment of the
self, is the meaning-content or “message” of discourse, taken as somewhat
independent and abstracted from the sensory/perceptual specificities of
media. Hence, the resistant subjectification, the politics of fostering courage
and terminating terror, would be reducible to the level of linguistic significa-
tion, to meaning-generation, communication, interpretation, and so on (see,
for instance, Nehamas 2000, 157–88). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the
aesthetics (and ethics) of existence becomes (strangely) an aesthetics indiffer-
ent and neutral toward the question of perception, sensation, and to differ-
ences in the materials (if this is the case, is there any specifc reason to even
speak of “aesthetics” anymore?).3
Yet, I would like to argue, in the second part of the chapter, that the case
is not quite as simple as that. Foucault begins to reflect on the significance of
sound when he is discussing the relation between the art of living and paideia
(which is somewhat roughly the Greek word for education):
This paideia, it is what one notices among people, who are, as the translation
says, ‘verbal artists (des artistes du verbe)’. It is, to put it exactly: phōnēs ergastik-
ous. Ergastikoi, they are the artisans, the workers, that is to say, people who
work not for themselves, but to sell and make profit. And what is the object,
on which these ergastikoi work? It is phōnē, in other words, speech in so far as it
makes noise (la parole en tant qu’elle fait du bruit), but not in so far as it is logos
or the reason (mais non pas en tant quelle [sic!] est le logos ou la raison). They
are, I would say, the ‘makers of words (les faiseurs de mots)’. They are the peo-
ple who fabricate, to sell these, a certain number of effects that are bound to the
sonority of words (d’effects qui sont liés à la sonorité des mots), instead of being
people who work for themselves at the level of logos (au niveau du logos), which
is to say, of the rational frame of the discourse (de l’armature rationnelle du dis-
cours). So, one has paideia, defined . . . as that which is the object itself of these
artisans of the verbal noise (de ces artisans du bruit verbal). (Foucault 2001a, 229;
emphasis added)
Terrorized by Sound? ● 233
control over the irrational realm (of instincts, drives, desires, impulses,
affects, etc.) (see Foucault 2001b, 396).
We can easily see how Foucault’s depiction of these “Platonic” techniques
or technologies of power (rational technologies of the irrational) relates to
some of the most central points in Foucault’s genealogical analyses of modern
forms of power. The significance of these sorts of technologies, if we want to
situate them in the framework of Foucault’s thought, is anything but a
curiosity of ancient political thought. The description of these technologies
that stimulate, direct, organize, instrumentalize, and “functionalize” drives,
desires, and instincts, that in turn produce aptitudes and dispositions, and by
these means take care of the usefulness and productivity (as a resource) of the
irrational, seems to fit well into Foucault’s well-known account of the basic
mechanisms of the modern disciplinary apparatus. We can also find one quite
concrete point of affinity between the Platonic account of mimetic paideia
(the musical-imitative governing over affects) and Foucault’s conception of
modern discipline. Discipline makes the individuals (their forces, their capac-
ities, their energies) useful and productive especially by shaping and organiz-
ing their manner or aptitude of orientation in time, the manner in which
their activity unfolds in the temporal axis. This is done by making them
internalize (educating and teaching them) an obligatory rhythm, a model or
pattern, which divides movements into punctual series of discrete, calculable
units, assigns them a definite direction and prescribes their order of succes-
sion (see Foucault 1979, 143, 151–52, 170, 187, 195–97, 200–3, 216–17;
2001c, 1486–90).
Also, in Foucault’s presentation, the technologies of the irrational—fur-
ther developments of the ancient “prototype” of paideia—would appear to be
particularly functional for the normalizing mode of modern power. As we
know, Foucault’s idea is that normalization aims at the correction and regu-
larization (making socially nondangerous) of the individual, not only (or
even primarily) at the level of actual behavior, but more essentially already
at the level of virtualities, that is, of possible behavior and capacities.
Normalization aims at detecting and correcting—and thus defending the
society against—the dangers to be found in the individual’s affects, impulses,
instincts/desires, motives, aptitudes, attitudes, and habits. Special attention is
focused on the direction and organization (or their lack) in the economy of
the irrational, precognitive, prelinguistic, and involuntary processes, and on
the “character” constituted by these. Hence, for normalization to be success-
ful, the rational technologies of the irrational are of particular importance
(see Foucault 1999, 23–24, 46, 84–86, 119–47; Foucault 2001c, 1461,
1471, 1474, 1482; Foucault 2001b, 452–64).
236 ● Lauri Siisiäinen
And now, we finally come back again to the issue of terror and fear. As
Foucault insists, both fear and terror have quite a significant role to play in
normalization as well. The force of a norm (and of law made to function as a
norm), the effectivity of guaranteeing compliance or conformism together
with the concomitant difficulty of resistance or subversion rests (at least for a
significant part) on the affects of terror and fear. Not, however, on the fear
and terror of sovereign violence, on the fear of punishment or anything of the
sort. Instead, the force of the norm rests on the fear, terror, and aversion
related to and aroused by the abnormal and socially dangerous as such, that
is, by the criminal, the pathological, the perverse, the subversive behavior,
affect, desire or person/character (without leaving any need for an exterior
threat of punishment or sanction). The technologies of the irrational—
among which the sonorous art has already been given its significance—are
precisely the ones used to provide the norm with this “motivating” force of
internalized fear and terror, to relate perversity to danger, fear, and terror
(Foucault 1999, 33; Foucault 2001b, 139).
If paideia is understood as something like the prototype of the power over
the irrational, it is not surprising that Foucault should construct the juxtapo-
sition, in which we find, on one side, the ethics/aesthetics of existence with
its protective discursive equipment (logos), and, on the other side, paideia, with
its arts and techniques of the irrational, the art of noise and sonorous/audi-
tory effects. As it has been emphasized, the equipment of true discourse is
needed to protect us—our liberty of self-creation and self-government—from
terror, and by these means to make us resistant to various attempts at govern-
ing us. In opposition to such discursive equipment, as we have noticed,
paideia with its sonorous arts, techniques/technologies seems to have its role
precisely in the affective government of the “soul”: “so, the function of phu-
siologia is to paraskeuein, to give the soul the equipment necessary for its com-
bat (son combat), for its objective and for its victory. As such, it is opposed to
paideia” (Foucault 2001a, 230).
Interestingly, when it comes to fostering courage—the absence of terror
that makes us resistant, unyielding, impermeable, and unruly—the sonorous
arts and techniques (in rhetoric or music) do not seem to have anything pos-
itive to offer. They can only stimulate, direct, organize, and shape our apti-
tude for pleasure and suffering, and the related aptitudes for fear and terror,
thus in the end only maintaining or enhancing our submission to these pas-
sive affects. And, as it turns out, it is precisely with paideia, not with the dis-
cursive protection of aesthetic liberty, that Foucault so strongly relates the art
of sonority, the art of noise, and the production of sonorous/auditory effects.
Sonority is not given any positive function when it comes to taking care of
Terrorized by Sound? ● 237
and protecting our liberty, to overcoming fear and terror, and to embracing
the arts of resistant subjectification. It appears as if music were, in somewhat
essential terms, depicted as the art that can only serve apparatuses of power,
not practices of resistance and freedom (a conclusion not exactly coherent
with Foucault’s basic ideas of genealogy; see, e.g., Foucault 2001c, 1004–24).
To this, I would like to add that the affinities between paideia and mod-
ern discipline/normalization can be found not only at the general level of
objects, goals, and strategies (in the control of the irrational, etc.). Moreover,
we could speak of modern elaboration/variation of the ancient model of
paideia (more or less explicitly, of course) also when it comes to the specific
technologies of power being used in this “positive” control of desires/
instincts. I am speaking of the use of music and sonorous techniques more
generally in modern discipline and normalization (albeit Foucault himself
does not really argue this point explicitly). There are various historical exam-
ples of the significance of musical/sonorous techniques of affective control,
even surpassing the significance of linguistic and visual techniques, in differ-
ent phases of development of modern forms of power. And, to be sure, the
examples I refer to here could be considered as being quite central also in the
light of Foucault’s genealogical studies.
First, I could point out various (rather well-known) examples of the
importance of music in the history of the Renaissance and the modern art of
war and military discipline, with the strong homage paid to the ancient mod-
els (see for instance the discussion of Machiavelli 1989, 621). Moreover, one
could take the French Revolution and the explicit attempt of the Jacobin gov-
ernment to return to the Greek and Roman models on the use of certain
musical modes, rhythms, and instruments in order to generate and maintain
a passionately patriotic, militant, self-sacrificial, and law-respecting citizenry
of the new Republic (see Johnson 1995, 116–53). Or, going ahead still fur-
ther in history, I could point out how in the modern psychological/psychi-
atric discourse and practice (in Foucault’s terms psy-function, la fonction psy),
music, and in particular rhythm and volume, has been given significance as a
mimetic instrument for controlling the normality and abnormality of indi-
viduals, as defined in terms of the order of durations, dynamics, and intensi-
ties of both bodily and mental processes (see, e.g., Condon 1986, 55–57,
58–75; Evans 1986, 266–73; Rider and Eagle 1986, 229–42). The ancient
musical paideia is, perhaps, not so remote and alien to us after all.
As we know, in his analyses of discipline and normalization Foucault’s
explicit focus is, in general, rather exclusively on the visual/optical (pan-opti-
cal) or discursive techniques, which makes him vulnerable to accusations of
certain visual bias, and of ignorance concerning the potentials and actual
238 ● Lauri Siisiäinen
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———. 2001a. L’Herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France. 1981–1982.
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———. 2001b. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Paris: éditions Gallimard.
———. 2001c. Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Paris: éditions Gallimard.
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———. 1989. In the empire of the gaze: Foucault and the denigration of vision in
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Terrorized by Sound? ● 241
Notes
1. For the criticism of Foucault’s interpretation targeted, among other things, on
his tendency to aestheticize, I recommend a review chapter by Pierre Hadot
(1992).
2. Foucault’s elaboration of this conception of aesthetic-ethical liberty—in partic-
ular its relation to Nietzsche—in his late thought has been discussed quite a lot
(see Foucault 2001b, 1211–12, 1436–37; see also Nehamas 2000, 157–88). To
point out certain differences between Nietzsche and Foucault on these issues
(and to problematize Foucault’s self-proclaimed “Nietzscheanism”) see, for
instance, Nietzsche 1950, §296; Nietzsche 1974, 25/385; Nietzsche 1969 (Ecce
Homo, Warum ich so gute Bücher Schreibe), §4.
3. Of course, one (prejudiced) reason for regarding these issues as being unimpor-
tant for Foucault might be the fact that they have been so closely related to
Phenomenology. Interestingly, Bennett (1996) speculates on whether Foucault’s
techniques of the self might have a special proximity with the “hand” and the
sense of touch, but the grounds for this conclusion remain somewhat obscure.
4. For examples of the strong visual emphasis in Foucault’s genealogies of modern
power (see, e.g., Foucault 1979, 187, 200; Foucault 2001c, 718, 741; Foucault
2001b,190, 197–98, 373–74; Foucault 2003, 71, 75–79, 103–4, 248,
300–301; Foucault 1999, 41–44). For the various critical arguments accusing
Foucault either of a reductive/essentialist account of vision, or of his neglect of
the role of audition and other senses (see Howes 2005; Law 2005; Sterne 2003,
14–19, 127–28; Schmidt 2003; Schafer 2003; Jay 1988, 307–26; Jay 1989,
175–205; Jay 1994, 6–7, 1–26, 381–416, 587–95; Jay 1996, 1–15; Flynn
1993, 273–86; Bal 1993, 379–405).
Index
9/11, 1–5, 8–9, 12, 65, 74, 97. See also And this, too, 40
September 11, 2001 animals, treatment of, 133
Anthelme, Robert, 118
abstract political art, 41–44, 46, 49, 76 Apel, Dora, 33
Abu Ghraib, 50 architecture, 5, 148, 155–56
Abu Ghraib 80, 37 Arendt, Hannah, 17–18, 97, 99, 106–7,
Abu Ghraib 81, 37 109–10, 207–14, 216–19
acting out, 3, 139–40 on modern political lie, 109–10
working through, 1, 13, 17, 112, 139 Aristotle, 141, 204, 210, 218
advertisements, 178–79 Art and Fear, 42
aesthetics, 13, 17, 19, 42–43, 48, 52, art and politics, 16, 57, 71, 75, 147–48,
62–63, 65, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 77, 169
222, 227–29, 231, 233, 234 art of living, 227–28, 230, 233–36
aesthetics and politics, 42, 63 audiovisual
aesthetics of existence, 227–29, 231, television and radio, 159
233, 238 audition, 227, 233, 240–41, 243
Afghanistan, 4–5, 8, 32, 62 Aura, 11, 13, 61–65, 67–75, 77, 79
Africa, 130, 137–38 Auschwitz, 14–15, 99, 106, 108, 110,
Aftermath, 63 112–13, 117, 119–20, 124
Agamben, Giorgio, 14, 72, 99, 105–9 Auster, Paul, 6
on biopolitics, 108 author, 1, 5, 7, 10, 15, 32–33, 84,
on Levi’s paradox, 105–8 89–91, 93–94, 99, 101, 113, 117,
on the state of exception, 106–7 119, 125–27, 129–32, 138–43,
agitation, 166, 168, 175–76 157, 163, 189
Alexander II, 88 author-as-character, 130
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 13, 42, 57 authoritarian, 16–17, 149–50
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The autobiography, 113, 119–20, 122,
Experience of Modernity, 10 125–26
Al Qaeda, 1, 32, 83–84, 222
amateur artists, 169 Babel, 2
America, 5, 8–9, 16, 213, 217, 222 Bakunin, Michael, 42, 86–88, 90–91,
American Civil War, 26, 29 94
Andries, Alexandru, 159 Bal, Mieke, 131
And there’s nothing to be done, 36 Bar Hama, Avner, 50
244 ● Index
cruelty, 29, 35, 133, 135–36, 143–44, Egoyan, Atom, 17, 185, 203
168 Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 212
cult of the leader, 160 Elderfield, John, 28, 30, 34–35
cultural policies, 147, 153 Elizabeth Costello, 15, 129, 131, 142
Cultural Revolution, 11, 16–17, Ellis, Brett Easton, 9
165–67, 170, 172–73, 175, 179–81 Ellsberg, Daniel, 207–8
cultural trauma, 13, 41–42, 46, 51, 57 Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 25
Engels, Friedrich, 10
Dadaism, 3, 70 Escena de Avanzada, 155, 163
Danner, Mark, 40 Espèces d’espaces, 44
Danto, Arthur, 31, 33 Ethical Irrationality of the World (rela-
death, 4–6, 8, 29, 34, 43, 55, 62, 65, tion between ends and means), 190,
68, 70, 75, 77, 80, 84–85, 87, 104, 194–95, 199
106, 108, 112, 120, 122–23, ethics
132–35, 140, 150, 153, 168, 180, classical, 189, 191, 193, 196, 202–4
186, 227–28 political, 189, 191, 194, 196–97,
DeLillo, Don, 2–5, 7, 9–10 200–204
depoliticization, 198 ethics and politics, 134, 185–86, 189,
Derrida, Jacques, 115 199–201, 204
Desastres de la Guerra, Los, 36, 39 ethics of conviction, 190
development, 124–25, 149, 154–55, ethics of responsibility, 197, 202
158, 167–68, 172, 214, 237, 239 ethnic cleansing, 6
Devils or Demons, The, 83. See also ethos, 64, 66–67, 74, 77, 143
Possessed, The Evans, Harriet, 166, 171
Diary of a Writer, The, 89, 92 evil, 14–15, 70, 73, 85, 92–95, 97–98,
dictation secretary, 142 102, 104, 106–8, 130, 135,
dictator, 16, 123, 147, 151, 160 138–41, 185–86, 189–91, 193–95,
dictatorship, 12, 16, 147–49, 151–52, 197, 200–201, 204, 212, 214–15,
155, 158–60 223
didactic function, 170 lesser evil/greater evil relation, 191,
direct media art, 41, 46, 48, 52, 55–56 197, 201, 204
Disapparition, 119 Execution of Emperor Maximilian, The,
Disgrace, 129, 142 12, 26–27, 34
Doctor Strangelove, 213
Dolto, Françoise, 124–26 Falling Man, 2, 10
Donald, Stephanie, 166, 171 Fatelessness, 117–18
Dongzi, Pan, 177 Father, 55
Dostoievski à Manhattan, 83 Fathers and Sons, 86
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhail, 9, 14, 16, fear, 13, 33, 42–43, 51, 55, 62–64, 68,
22, 83–84, 87–95 73, 75, 77, 87, 102, 118, 150, 152,
Duo, Duo, 173 160, 165–66, 175–76, 178,
180–81, 195, 219, 227–28,
Eaglestone, Robert, 114, 116–19, 125 230–33, 236, 238–41
Eagleton, Terry, 83 Felman, Shoshona, 114, 116
246 ● Index
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its political art, 12, 19, 26–27, 41–44, 46,
Enemies, 92 49, 69–70, 74, 76
Om el Phaem, 45 political judgment of the genocide, 98
Ondaatje, Michael, 2, 9 political language, 199
On Photography, 39, 63 political logic, 189, 191
Orientalism, 84 political power, 151, 154, 190, 233
origins, 46, 50, 65, 67–69, 75, 77, politics, 9, 12, 16, 18, 26, 29, 35,
84, 107 41–42, 57, 63–65, 68–75, 77, 79,
Origins of Totalitarianism, The, 107 85, 108–9, 134, 147–48, 153, 155,
167–69, 185–86, 189–91, 196,
painting, 11, 26–30, 34, 36, 39, 57, 70,
198–202, 204, 207, 209–10, 212,
156, 179–80
214, 216, 218–21, 234
paintings, 13, 27–31, 34–37, 39–40,
Populists (narodniki), 88
44, 156, 170–71, 179–80
positive role models, 167, 171, 177, 181
Pakistan, 4–5, 8
Palestine, 50 Possessed, The, 14, 83, 88–91, 93–94.
Palmer, Alan, 131 See also Devils or Demons, The
Pentagon Papers, The, 17, 207–9, posters, 16, 165–66, 169–81
212–13, 217 posttrauma, 46, 49
People’s Republic of China, 169 power, 3, 20, 36, 44, 49–50, 56, 73–74,
Perec, Georges, 4, 15, 44, 113, 119–26 97, 109–10, 114, 133, 136,
perpetrators, 6, 14, 32–36, 57, 65, 104, 140–41, 147–48, 150–54, 160,
135, 139, 142 169–70, 173–76, 190, 198,
Petersburg, 16 207, 209, 215, 229, 232–33,
Peter the Great, 21, 92 236–40, 243
Phelan, James, 130 Precarious Life, 219
photographs, Abu Ghraib, 13, 32–37 Prisonieros, Los, 159
potential to communicate emotions, 34 professional artists, 167, 179–80
Western discourse on Abu Ghraib propaganda posters, 16, 165–66,
photographs, 32–33 169–70, 178–79, 181
photography, 10–12, 25, 28–29, 31, Proust, Marcel, 211
58, 63 Pushkin, Alexander, 9, 21–22
aerial photography, 29
desensitizing effect of, 25, 31 Qing, Jiang, 171
war photography, 29 Quinzaine littéraire, 122
Picador is Unhorsed and Falls under the
Bull, A, 30 Rancière, Jacques, 63, 71–75, 77
Picasso, Pablo, 29 rational, 65, 67, 84, 189, 202, 216,
Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 187–88 234, 236–37, 241
Pihlainen, Kalle, 114 Raz, Guy, 43–44, 48, 58, 63, 75–77
Pinochet, Augusto Ugarte, 12, 148–54, reading, 8–9, 11, 14, 17, 19–20, 30, 41,
156, 159–61 44, 67, 72, 93, 98, 101, 104, 106,
Pintilie, Lucian, 158 114, 116, 123–24, 127, 129,
Plato, 169, 204, 236, 240 141–42, 187, 227, 234
250 ● Index
terror, ix, 1–6, 9–19, 23, 41–44, 46, truth-teller (as politician), 109–10
48–50, 52–53, 55–58, 61–65, 68, Levi as a truth-teller, 14–15, 97–99,
73–74, 76–77, 81, 83–86, 89–90, 109–10
93–95, 97–98, 110–11, 116, 129, standpoint of the truth-teller, 109
137, 139, 143, 145, 149–50, 152, Tsar Alexander II, 88
161, 165–67, 172, 175–76, Turgenev, Ivan, 86
179–82, 205, 212–13, 222, TWA, 52, 57
227–28, 230–36, 238–41 Twin Towers, 2, 8, 42, 65, 218
terror (governmental), 11, 16–17, 145, Two Seconds, 43, 58, 63, 75–76
180, 182
Ullman, Micha, 42
terrorism, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 33,
United Nations Office on Drugs and
41–42, 56, 73, 83–86, 89–90,
Crime (UNODC), 165
93–94, 97–98, 110, 165–66, 181 unpolitical, 190
terrorist, 1–2, 4–9, 14, 22, 42–43, 48, untitled (Dganit Berest), 52
52, 56–57, 62, 65, 73, 83–84, 88, Updike, John, 7–8, 131
94, 131, 166, 181, 215, 218–19,
222 values, 10, 32–33, 69–70, 73–74, 84,
Terrorist, 8, 131 106, 152, 160, 167, 169, 172, 181,
testimonial, 5, 116, 155, 157 190–92, 197–98, 200–202, 216
theater, 73–74, 155, 157–58 fight for, 190, 198, 201–2
Theorien der deutschen Faschismus, 69 science, 190, 201
Third Reich, 97, 101, 133 Vie mode d’emploi, La, 119, 121, 123
time, 2, 5, 10–11, 14, 18–19, 22, 32, Vietnam, 207–8, 214–16, 223
42–43, 61–68, 71–73, 75–78, 85, violence, 1–2, 4, 11–14, 17–18, 29–31,
103, 111, 115, 161, 171, 179, 237 42, 55, 78, 85–87, 90–91, 94, 117,
Tismăneanu, Vladimir, 152 165–66, 168, 173, 175–76,
totalitarian, 2, 16–17, 97, 119, 147, 180–81, 190–91, 194–95, 198,
149–51, 154, 156, 212–13, 219 200, 202, 207, 214, 216, 218–21,
totalitarian governments, 2 232, 238
totalitarianism, 97–98, 107 Virilio, Paul, 42
visual arts, 11, 148, 155–56, 167, 170,
trauma, 1–3, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 41–42,
180
46, 48–49, 51, 57, 102, 113, 120,
visual studies, 18
122, 124–27, 129, 135, 138–43,
Vogl, Joseph, 34
166
voice, 2, 18, 22, 35, 40, 92–93,
trauma, transitional, 138–39
99–102, 105–6, 126, 133, 140,
Treblinka, 133
142–43, 188, 227, 235–36, 240
truth, 14–16, 63, 65–66, 68, 74, 94,
98–99, 109–11, 113–14, 122–23, Wackstein, David, 50–51
126–27, 176–78, 185, 187–92, Waiting for the Barbarians, 129
194, 196, 210, 214, 216, 218, 222, Waked, Sharif, 46, 58
228, 231–33. See also lie; lying Wall, The, 52–53
Truth and Politics, 210 Washington Post, The, 207
252 ● Index